You and your team are always on the move. You’re at the office, then at home, then on a flight to New York. And you need tools to make this on-the-go work environment as effective as possible for you when you’re away from coworkers. We help teams create and share great documents from wherever. But what other mobile tools do we like in our kit?
Managing expenses is always a pain, especially when you’re travelling. With Shoeboxed Mobile, you can snap pictures of receipts and business cards with your phone and email them in for processing to your account. So, you’ll never lose another restaurant expense again, and keep your working relationship with accounting in the black.
Orbitz has been known as a great place to find hotel, airline tickets, and other deals. But their mobile applications are truly impressive. How often have you unexpectedly been stuck in a town without a convenient hotel? Be the hero for your traveling companions and use Orbitz’s apps for iPad / iPhone and Android to find a place for your team to bunk.
If Apple's recent iPad sales are anything to go by, they're absolutely killing it. Last week's iCloud announcement also positions them well to capture the consumer cloud storage market and further entrench them as the online music store leaders.
But what about the mid-market and enterprise?
My employer, KnowledgeTree, is a cloud document management software vendor servicing mid-market customers in finance, operations, HR, and legal. KnowledgeTree’s customers include Global 2,000 customers such as Alcatel-Lucent, Panera Bread, Orbitz, Miramax, and Fujifilm.
Wow, kudos to Apple on their iCloud announcement today. I for one am extremely keen on trying out their new OS’s and iCloud service. Apple has often been highly successful at building a coherent vision from many disparate threads, and executing flawlessly on that vision. I think this is one of those moments.
Apple is taking the abstract concept of the cloud to millions of consumers, and making it real by demonstrating how they can sync their content across devices, and no longer lose precious photos, favorite music and phone data in the inevitable “toilet tumble”. Microsoft’s “take it to the cloud” campaign attempted to do this, but Apple makes it a reality by solving everyday problems beautifully.
We’re now looking forward to working with the many more companies that have been educated on the enormous value that the cloud brings.
Here at KnowledgeTree, we help companies derive value from their business content. We’d love to work with Apple in doing so. We love their devices, we love their software. And so do our customers.
We work with mid-market and global 2,000 companies who want to share, control and drive actionable insight from the content they create. They want to do so across their organizations, or within smaller departmental or team groupings. And they want to use their browser, mobile device, Office applications, and / or desktop.
There are few kinds of organizations that produce as many documents as legal teams. Whether at a law firm or in an internal corporate counsel team, contracts and other agreements are in constant supply.
Because of that match between our document management tool and the legal profession, I spend a great deal of time monitoring legal discussions of technology. And of late, I’ve been building a list of some of the most interesting minds and voices in the world of legal technology, and I wanted to share, should you be interested in what just a few of these good folks are about and why you should follow them:
David Bilinksy writes the blog Thoughtful Legal Management. His mission in life is to empower lawyers to anticipate the changes, realize the opportunities, face the challenges and embrace the expanding possibilities of the application of practice management concepts to the practice of law in innovative ways that provide service excellence. He is a Practice Management Consultant/Advisor for the Law Society of British Columbia, Chair of the Pacific Legal Technology Conference, a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and past Editor-in-Chief of ABA’s Law Practice Magazine. You can find him on Twitter at @david_bilinsky.
KnowledgeTree is used by professionals every day to control document chaos. A department that most often feels the pain of managing thousands of documents is Human Resources. Between new employee packages, offer letters, and benefits agreements, HR has a lot of content to control.
As we’ve looked at how KnowledgeTree’s tools have helped HR to manage their documents and files, we’ve come across many cloud-based resources that help manage other HR processes. Here is a list of 5 HR tools that can help mid-sized companies.
Bullhorn
Bullhorn enables users to communicate and collaborate with contacts, candidates, colleagues and clients in real-time to generate, source and fill job orders, at any time and from any place.
Cogentys
Web-based learning management system provides cost-effective training for an organization’s workforce.
Workforce Growth
WorkforceGrowth wants to help companies foster a culture of recognition, support and feedback. The solution helps teams to recognize employees for their good work.
Paychex
The big benefit of Paychex for mid-sized is that it allows one person to perform payroll, taxes, and employee processes while still having time to complete other tasks.
Firefish
Online Recruitment Software which helps recruitment agencies and in-house recruitment teams get found, target, attract and hire top talent through the web.
CFOs have been at the forefront of adopting cloud technologies. And it’s no surprise. Cloud-based tools provide significant cost advantages and avoid up-front capital outlays. At the same time, they can be easily innovated and administered. Plus, they make analytics and actionable insights easily accessible to CFOs and their colleagues. Of course risk is always a concern for CFOs. But when contrasted with notable outages and security incidents of on-premise tools, the cloud’s economies of scale, innate high availability, and regimentation of security protocols are preferable.
KnowledgeTree provides me with the opportunity to chat with many CFOs and since several applications are regularly mentioned by customers, I've compiled them in the list below. The number of companies leveraging cloud apps are far too numerous to list. I have however included some interesting case studies for many of the vendors and representing some of the significant benefits seen by CFOs.
What cloud apps for finance are you using to ensure your business is competitive? Respond with a comment below, or tweet me.
Wikibon has put together a wonderful infographic detailing why cloud-based applications and services are so compelling for mid-market businesses. With infrastructure costs to customers being approximately a sixth of traditional datacenter infrastructure, it is no wonder that cloud providers are seeing such explosive growth.
There’s really no excuse for not using cloud-based applications. There are so many B2B cloud apps that are proven and popular. It’s more about a mindset change. Recently, I was delighted to read in InformationWeek that 74 percent of SMBs will be increasing their spending on cloud-based software this year. After all, with SaaS, what’s not to like – scalability, no expensive hardware to maintain, anytime/anywhere accessibility and, one of my favorites, constant innovation cycles.
I’m always eager to find out which cloud apps are being used by mid-market organizations to fuel their business engines and, based on my discussions with peers and customers of KnowledgeTree’s cloud-based document management solution, here’s the list I compiled:
If deploying a document management solution seems daunting for your organization, don’t worry – KnowledgeTree has distilled the document management best practice process into 8 manageable steps.
View an infographic that illustrates the 8 Steps for Success when selecting and implementing online document management software for your small and medium business.
You’ll be walked through a set of key points to consider as you:
Define your document management objectives and system requirements
Understand your business processes
Determine your preferred delivery model – on-premise or hosted
