Archive for March, 2011

The HyperOffice Promise

Cloud email security is a hot topic these days, especially after the much publicized Gmail glitches a few weeks ago.

We felt this was a good time to reiterate our commitments to our customers, and bring your attention to what we offer in terms of stability and security, and our track record.

The vendor-customer relation in software-as-a-service is fundamentally one of trust. The customer entrusts the vendor with sensitive corporate data and the efficient working of systems which impact their business performance. This is especially true of a solution like HyperOffice which is a pervasive part of your day to day operations. At HyperOffice, we hold this trust in highest regard. Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, which is how we have grown over many years, and will continue to grow. We have systems and procedures in place that are at par with the very best in industry, to ensure that you get the best products, services and stability.

HyperOffice offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is the highest standard offered in the industry. We have a narrow allowance of .1%, meaning 8.76 hours per year, or around 43 minutes per month, to include all unforeseen contingencies AND scheduled downtime. In all previous years, we have maintained an impeccable record, and have been able to keep well within this slim window. This is one the best records in the industry, compared to even prominent solutions like Google’s Gmail, which has experienced well publicized outages over the past couple of years, including one just last week, where it took them as long as four days to restore affected accounts. In close to 10 years of operation, HyperOffice has NEVER experienced a data breach or lost customer data.

HyperOffice is hosted at the best data centers in the world, manned and monitored by engineers around the clock. We incorporate redundancy across every node in our network of servers and the latest fault tolerance technology to maximize system uptime. Security is implemented at multiple levels, and all problems attacked and resolved within minutes of them occurring. With such systems in place, you get continuity and stability that would be near impossible for most businesses to achieve in house. A study from Radicati Group found that on-premises email averaged 3.8 hours of downtime per month, and the number was even greater for Microsoft Exchange.

At times, for all our preparedness, there may be problems caused by external factors beyond our control. For example, there may be network problems on the internet preventing your request to connect to HyperOffice servers from reaching our servers. There are also times when because of network saturation or poor connection you may experience slower than usual speed with HyperOffice. Note that HyperOffice is a rich and robust application that requires adequate connection speeds, bandwidth and processing power on your system. Regardless our engineers are working hard to constantly optimize the performance and stability of HyperOffice despite external or internal factors.

We would like to reemphasize that you - our customers are at the centre of everything we do. Our customer focus remains one of the key pillars of our company, and our “personal touch” is one of the reasons you choose us over larger players like Google and Microsoft. We are totally committed to provide you with the highest quality services and products.

We are ever ready to go that extra mile, for your continued trust.

All about Collaboration and Collaboration Suites

Ramon Ray from the Small Biz Tech Magazine, recently published a video from the Boston leg of the Small Business Tech Tour, held late last year. The video features a panel of experts in the online collaboration industry moderated by Laurie McCabe, including our own Shahab Kaviani at HyperOffice. The topic of discussion is “How to Listen Inside Your Company?“.

The discussion revolves around some basic issues related to collaboration and collaboration suites - What are collaboration suites? Why do you need them? What are the internal or external warning signs which tell you that you need a collaboration suite? How much effort does it require to implement one in your organization?

Someone like the blogger, who is deeply involved in the collaboration industry, might sometimes lose perspective on these basics. This discussion is a refreshing re-orientation, and a reminder of the critical need and palpable benefits of collaboration and collaboration suites in the day to day working of a company in the new business environment.

SMBs will instantly relate to the discussion because it starts from their daily operational needs, and then justifies the use of collaboration software to satisfy those needs. This video is also a great introduction for SMBs who may have heard a lot of background noise about collaboration software, but want to find more, and beginning to ask critical questions like - are collaboration suites for me? is now the right time?

The video:-

What are Collaboration Suites?

Every company utilizes some tools to work together with people inside and outside the organization - IM, web conferencing, email, document management etc. Rather than having scattered tools, and having problem linking different pieces of collaboration, collaboration suites combine all of these tools into a single integrated suite accessible over the web. HyperOffice is one of the leading evangelists of fully integrated communication and collaboration tools.

Why are the signs that my company needs collaboration tools?

1) If you are a small business which notices that it is going to pass the 2-3 office location mark, rather than setting up costly servers in house to enable employees to share information, it may be more efficient to simply subscribe for an online collaboration suite.

2) As a company increasingly gets work done from outside contractors, who are deeply involved in its work, using an online collaboration suite to enable collaboration and information sharing is in order. This makes sense since you have no control over the contractor’s tech environment, and collaboration suites require no more than a web browser to be used by either party.

3) If a company finds that everyone’s inboxes are increasingly unmanageable due to emails being used for scheduling, document attachments being sent back and forth, task assignments and so on, it makes sense to move these collaborative needs to collaboration tools designed specifically for those purposes.

People are just too addicted to email. How do I garner adoption for a collaboration suite in my company?

Adoption is mainly a function of how motivated a team is to employ a collaboration suite. Leaders play an important role. A leader can spearhead implementation and adoption by encouraging employees to resist the temptation of email, and use the right collaboration tool for the right purpose. Sometimes it may simply mean mild coercion. For example if someone sends a manager a document as an email attachment, they should ask the employee to upload it in the document management system. Or if they try to schedule a meeting through email, send them to the company calendar.