Microsoft Agile Cloud Working
May 29, 2012
A popular application that you can source from your Cloud provider is Microsoft Sharepoint, which you can also of course obtain from Office 365.
The key way to approach these tools is with ‘Social Computing’ in mind, simply meaning the use of social media web sites, like those of Facebook or Linkedin, for your own corporate purposes.
These are faster and more popular than any other IT tool and so can greatly improve internal staff collaboration and productivity, that overall can be described as ‘Agile Cloud Working‘ best practices…
Agile Cloud Working
As sites like Facebook demonstrate, social media can enable very high-speed exchange of information between large groups of diverse people, and so are natural models for corporate knowledge management.
A base offering of Sharepoint can be further tailored with add-in modules so that it reflects all of these types of features, such as ’micro-blogging’ (twittering) and so forth.
What is crucial is the virtual enterprise structure that it enables, the use of these systems to better organize your departmental flows of information. For example imagine then that via this tweeting method you can send a message to the HR department as quickly as tweeting: @{HR} – I Need a Pay Raise, Quick!
This ‘submission box’ of @{HR} is the digital suggestion box of the new virtual economy we live in, and smart businesses can embrace their benefits while also realizing big cost savings – This is very low-cost business infrastructure, but can be used for key activities like encouraging more innovation, as staff can more easily send in Ideas and Feedback.
Sharepoint Cloud Solutions
This partner ecosystem is a key value of the Sharepoint option for a Cloud collaboration platform, there are others who also extend it in other ways too.
For example in a previous blog we profiled Colligo, who tackle offline replication requirements and also help boost staff productivity, and others like Metalogix who cater for ‘Sharepoint Cloud Storage‘. It might be that you want to run your Sharepoint software in-house, while offloading this lower level storage function to a local IaaS provider.
This is the critical point about Cloud Computing, it’s not just one scenario of ‘host your app in the Cloud’ but rather that there is a growing marketplace of all kinds of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and increasingly BPaaS (Business Process as a Service), that you can pick and choose from and also mix and match with on/off site combinations too.
In conclusion this means that your local ‘Agile Cloud Providers’ will be able to offer this type of menu of options so that you offer your staff not just the latest gadget methods but that are also secured in line with corporate standards and reducing costs.