Work anywhere

Wouldn’t it be great if you and your staff could work anywhere: at home, on the train, in a café? Do you want to pick up your email using a Smartphone or Pocket PC any time you like?

Would you like to share your diary with your colleagues back in the office, updated with any changes you make while you are away? Microsoft SBS 2003 can help keep you and your people in touch, wherever you are.

It’s a fact of life that in today’s business environment we need to be able to respond to customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s also a government requirement to give serious consideration to employees’ requests for flexible work patterns. So how is it possible to satisfy both your customers and your employees’ demands? Through effective use of mobile technology and remote access, it is possible to be accessible to your customers, and offer your employees the ability to work flexibly. By going mobile, there are significant additional benefits some of which are:

• Increased productivity: When you have uninterrupted access to information productivity is greatly increased as there is no ‘dead-time’ when you’re unable to work.
• Customer satisfaction: You’re able to respond to customer commitments and queries out of the office as easily as when you are in the office.
• Job satisfaction: When employees have the freedom to control where they work it can increase their satisfaction, which means a happier workforce who are more committed.

The basic requirements are relatively few and it’s easier than you might think to go mobile. There are a number of devices on the market to help.

As the name suggests, a Pocket PC is a small, highly portable computer. Instead of using a keyboard, Pocket PCs recognise your handwriting and some even feature a small keyboard. Using SBS 2003, emails, calendar appointments, contact information and tasks can all be synchronised with the information you see in Microsoft Outlook ® 2003. What’s more you can even download Microsoft Word and Excel documents to read and edit anywhere. Some Pocket PCs have built-in wireless or Bluetooth™ connections that let you connect to the Internet and SBS 2003 remotely.

Using a Microsoft Windows ® -based Smartphone you can synchronise, read and reply to your email anywhere by connecting to the server using the built-in dial-up access. Just like a PDA, it also lets you access your calendar, contacts and to-do list. All this in a phone-sized package.

Using a dial-in connection or a wireless network on a regular laptop, you can use Outlook to stay in touch while you are away from the office. SBS 2003 makes synchronising Outlook over a remote connection fast and easy. It also supports ‘virtual private networks’ that let people connect to the entire office network securely.

SBS 2003 helps you stay connected using any computer with an internet connection, on a friend’s PC for example, or one in an internet café. Using any web browser you can securely check your email, contacts and calendar and you can access your office computer by remote control.

How remote access works
Whatever hardware you have and however you want to connect, SBS 2003 has the technology built-in to make it easy.

Outlook Web Access gives you much of the rich functionality of Outlook – email, calendar, contacts and tasks – in a web browser. All you need is an internet-equipped PC and you can connect to the email server in SBS 2003 wherever you are.

Outlook Mobile Access lets Pocket PCs, Smartphones and laptops synchronise diaries, contacts and emails with the server in an efficient and secure way over the Internet, typically using a dial-up connection over a landline, a GPRS connection using a mobile phone or wireless networking in an internet café or other hotspot.

Remote Desktop gives you remote control of your office PC over the Internet from any PC with a browser. It’s like you were sitting in the office. 

SharePoint lets you access your company intranet website remotely.

Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a way of securely connecting a remote computer into the office network so you can access everything as if you were in the office. This is useful, for example, when you need to access company databases or other specialist applications while out of the office.