#cloud portal

[myhubintranet]

Intranet Builder: Short On Time? Is A Cloud Intranet The Solution?

Are you looking to build an intranet for your company? Here are the options open to you and we present the smart intranet builder choice.

[ensim]

Fully integrated cloud billing & cloud provisioning solutions for Enterprises & Service Providers. We provide an end-to-end solution that can be deployed on a modular basis

[ensim]

Service Provider and Enterprise IT Service Catalog with turn-key cloud marketplace for ordering, billing, rating, invoicing, chargeback, showback, etc.

[vonazon-inc]

How to Retain Your Best People with the Right Cloud Tools

People are not machines, and employment engagement is a clear example of the difference between them. A machine is either on or off, but for employees engagement can run the whole gamut of ‘totally onboard’ to ‘barely there’. The stakes for organizations concerning employee engagement are high. Companies whose employee engagement is in the top 25 percent have been estimated to make more than twice the revenue of companies where engagement is in the bottom 25 percent. Also, there is four times as much chance that the less engaged employees quit compared to the more engaged employees.

Bottom Line Impacts

But the problem doesn’t stop with a less engaged employee leaving. If the organization wants to replace the employee, it will need to spend time and effort to find the new person, while dealing with possible internal disruption, reduction of knowledge and lower morale. Figures of six months to repair the damage and a third of the departing employee’s salary to locate and bring onboard a replacement are all too common. Keeping employees engaged is more profitable and less expensive, especially when they include your best people.

What’s Your Theory?

How to reinforce engagement is a question that has kept HR departments busy for years. Maslow’s and Hertzberg’s theories are perennial favorites. Their ideas also carry over into new business contexts such as mobile working and cloud business process environments. Both of these recent developments extend employer-employee relationships beyond the traditional workplace, with the possibility of accentuating both the positive and the negative. Good cloud tools in particular can help boost positive engagement.

Mixing Social and Professional in the Cloud

More employees are now expecting and claiming the right to change the way they work – if not completely outside the organization, then at least in parallel with it.  With BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), they use the same computing device for both their social and their professional lives. It is the organization of the information inside that device that demarcates one mode of use from the other, although social interaction is increasingly blending with professional activity. As consumers they expect to be able to access information they need instantly, independently of time and location. This expectation is now spilling over to the workplace.

Any Time, Any Place

Cloud work tools that support this new work paradigm are the ones most likely to find favor.  At the lower level, facilitation of mobile connections to resources such as project management applications is a first step. Single sign-on for secure access to all authorized PM applications is the next. Increasing the sociability of project management work with social media style tools is yet another way to deepen positive engagement, allowing companies to retain employees longer.

Don’t Just Retain – Attract Too

There’s further potential advantage to be had as well. A web presence with the cloud portal described above can demonstrate how an enterprise has embraced the new model of working. Cloud-based talent will then naturally gravitate towards that enterprise. Instead of scrambling to replace employees who leave, a business will be able to retain them and then expand at its own pace, hiring in more of the best via the cloud.

Contact LoadSpring today to find out how we can help with tools like our cloud portal SpringBoard 7.0 and mobile tool LoadSpringMobile. Call 978.685.9715 or send us an email [email protected].

[loadspring-solutions]

How to Retain Your Best People with the Right Cloud Tools

People are not machines, and employment engagement is a clear example of the difference between them. A machine is either on or off, but for employees engagement can run the whole gamut of ‘totally onboard’ to ‘barely there’. The stakes for organizations concerning employee engagement are high. Companies whose employee engagement is in the top 25 percent have been estimated to make more than twice the revenue of companies where engagement is in the bottom 25 percent. Also, there is four times as much chance that the less engaged employees quit compared to the more engaged employees.

Bottom Line Impacts

But the problem doesn’t stop with a less engaged employee leaving. If the organization wants to replace the employee, it will need to spend time and effort to find the new person, while dealing with possible internal disruption, reduction of knowledge and lower morale. Figures of six months to repair the damage and a third of the departing employee’s salary to locate and bring onboard a replacement are all too common. Keeping employees engaged is more profitable and less expensive, especially when they include your best people.

What’s Your Theory?

How to reinforce engagement is a question that has kept HR departments busy for years. Maslow’s and Hertzberg’s theories are perennial favorites. Their ideas also carry over into new business contexts such as mobile working and cloud business process environments. Both of these recent developments extend employer-employee relationships beyond the traditional workplace, with the possibility of accentuating both the positive and the negative. Good cloud tools in particular can help boost positive engagement.

Mixing Social and Professional in the Cloud

More employees are now expecting and claiming the right to change the way they work – if not completely outside the organization, then at least in parallel with it.  With BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), they use the same computing device for both their social and their professional lives. It is the organization of the information inside that device that demarcates one mode of use from the other, although social interaction is increasingly blending with professional activity. As consumers they expect to be able to access information they need instantly, independently of time and location. This expectation is now spilling over to the workplace.

Any Time, Any Place

Cloud work tools that support this new work paradigm are the ones most likely to find favor.  At the lower level, facilitation of mobile connections to resources such as project management applications is a first step. Single sign-on for secure access to all authorized PM applications is the next. Increasing the sociability of project management work with social media style tools is yet another way to deepen positive engagement, allowing companies to retain employees longer.

Don’t Just Retain – Attract Too

There’s further potential advantage to be had as well. A web presence with the cloud portal described above can demonstrate how an enterprise has embraced the new model of working. Cloud-based talent will then naturally gravitate towards that enterprise. Instead of scrambling to replace employees who leave, a business will be able to retain them and then expand at its own pace, hiring in more of the best via the cloud.

Contact LoadSpring today to find out how we can help with tools like our cloud portal SpringBoard 7.0 and mobile tool LoadSpringMobile. Call 978.685.9715 or send us an email [email protected].

- See more at: http://www.loadspring.com/blog/?p_id=4132#sthash.cZwaNszn.dpuf

[vonazon-inc]

Mobile? What is Mobile Computing?

Mobile computing is not only about your device. It’s about letting you enable a mobilized workforce.

Smartphones and tablets let the mobile workforce gain access to data away from the office, in the client’s conference room, in the airport, or at the project site.  With mobile devices, it is no longer necessary to be cut off from the life line of information when you are away from the office.

The cloud makes all this possible.  The cloud is no longer something dark and ominous or melancholy:  “It’s a cloudy day.”  “Dark and cloudy skies are forecast.”  “There is a cloud hanging over my head.”  Rare was the enthusiastic “cloud with a silver lining.”

Now cloud means something altogether different, at least for those of us who are not mariners or pilots.  Cloud computing means paying a subscription fee to access software hosted by a third-party.  It also means taking big computer servers out of your own data center and renting space on servers from a cloud-service provider instead.  That drives down operating costs due to economies of scale:  the cloud server provider has more computers than you and specialists doing computer administration per computer, so all of this costs less.  These cost savings are passed along to the customer.

Mobile computing means using smartphone applications to tap into that.  The real benefit of mobile computing in the cloud is having access to information where you need it.  Mobile device applications provide access to this back-end data to users in the field.

Today, people who work in the field prefer smartphones and tablets.  Who wants to lug a 14” laptop to the project site? It hardly fits on the fold down tray of the cramped airplane seat. If the guy sitting in front of you reclines his seat, you can hardly work with your knees in your chest, plus the moron has just pinned your computer to the tray, so you cannot move it at all.

Smartphones are wonderful and convenient, but they have a small screen.  It is awkward to use the company’s portal to try to enter data into the contract and project management website (portal) when the screen won’t fit on the page and keeps shifting around as you try to type into it.  What the mobile user needs is an easy-to-use data entry screen that is specifically designed for the size of the small screen of the mobile phone and tablet. The fields need to be large and easy-to-fill and not disappear altogether when the touch-screen keyboard pops into view.

People working on projects in the field need to be able to update the status and due dates on tasks assigned to them.  They need to be able to update contract information and route changes to their boss for approval.  While the project might be located in one country, the engineering might be done in another.  Contractors and far flung employees need to be able to get onto the project management system, over the internet, regardless of where they are located and without the annoying need to connect to VPN and create a VPN account for each person on the project.

This is where mobile cloud applications come in. LoadSpring Solutions, Inc. is a leader in program management software hosting and cloud management. LoadSpring’s project management software, SpringBoardTM 7.0, not only runs in the cloud, it also comes in a convenient smartphone application called LoadSpringMobileTM.  LoadSpringMobile is designed to fit the screen of the mobile user’s tablet or smartphone, unlike portals which are designed for the desktop.

LoadSpringMobile is secure.  The Internet connection back to the cloud is encrypted, because it uses HTTPS (SSL encryption) to connect to Primavera 6 and Contract Manager.  No hacker sitting in Starbucks can spy on your data in transit.  No data is stored on the mobile device, so there is no risk of losing company secrets if you lose your phone or it is stolen. The result is an easy interface to multiple backend applications. That way, you’ll know that updates made in the field securely make it into the server. If only the barista could make choosing which latte to order that simple.

So leave the laptop in the hotel, in the office, or at home and use your mobile phone or tablet to access project management software in the cloud instead.  As for meteorological clouds, if it is a cloudy day, take along your umbrella.

If you have questions about the cloud or need additional material related to our blog. Just ask us.

[ensim]

Ensim has added a 'cloud marketplace' capability to its service catalog, automation and provisioning portfolio. Read More

[ensim]

Service Provider and Enterprise IT Service Catalog with turn-key cloud marketplace for ordering, billing, rating, invoicing, chargeback, showback, etc.