Discover the latest advancements in technology for businesses in Australia. Delve into digital transformation, cybersecurity, cloud computing, AI and more.
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Whether you’re solo or scaling, here’s our go-to list of tools (some free, some freemium) that help you eliminate repetitive tasks, save time, and run your business more efficiently — without the bloat or overwhelm.
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Understanding your business from the inside out is vital to be as productive as possible, but have you thought about how to implement better processes through improved data collection? Josh was joined by Sean Kelly to discuss some ways to get more out of your business.
Are you identifying your customers’ needs and making sure that you build the best customer relationship with them possible? Josh was joined by Nicholas Stankiewicz to discuss how to make sure that you can make everyone happy by building positive customer relationships.
Cloud computing is a major aspect of thousands of businesses, but there are a lot of mitigating factors that can confuse people. Josh was joined by Sayuj Nath, a cloud mitigation expert, to discuss all things to do with the cloud and how you can use it to help your operations.
Sayuj is the Principle Consultant at Slalom. In his role, he consults with businesses on strategy, technology, and business transformation regarding cloud services.
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In today’s fast-paced business world, it’s more important than ever to have access to the right information at the right time. But with so much data to manage, it can be challenging to make sense of it all. That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. Josh was joined by Tony Webster from Inviga to explain how your business can be better with AI.
Tony is an expert in the field of AI who has over 20 years of experience in the information technology industry. During this time, he has worked with organisations in Australia and New Zealand to translate their ideas and intents and collaborate on producing the best solution possible.
The pandemic has shaken up businesses all over the world, but our love for technology did not fade a bit. COVID-19 and the lockdowns just shifted our use of technology. Some might say that the pandemic brought a mixture of blessings and curses to tech providers. Most of us started using technology we weren’t using pre-pandemic, while some ditched their favourite tools in favour of ones that are more suitable for working remotely or telecommuting. Here’s a rundown of the way COVID-19 caused a shift in the way we use technology these days.
How has technology helped us during COVID-19? People bid goodbye to conference rooms and said hello to video conferencing tools. Zoom among other online conferencing platforms have become a staple in households as business meetings and even classes have moved online. More people started to become familiar with Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, and some companies even started satellite projects like extensions for specific industries like finance and customer service.
For those who want to host their own videoconferencing system, they can turn to Jitsi, an open-source tool. We’re all about security here at Dorks Delivered and Jisti is all about that. Plus, it can be a cheaper option for videoconferencing.
With people working from home, office management tools designed to simplify office work have lost their purpose. A lot of people stopped using software for scheduling conference rooms as well as hardware like proximity sensors for conference rooms.
While people work from home and can’t have face-to-face meetings, many business owners and project managers realised the importance of technology during COVID-19. Collaboration tools have become quite useful to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Slack, Trello, Microsoft Teams and Workplace From Facebook help us discuss, organize, and track all of our work in one place.
No more boards on the wall or papers spread across tables. Everything is on the online whiteboard or Kanban boards, whichever you prefer. In fact, we love Trello so much that we made an episode about it even before the lockdowns started. If you’re one of those considering working at a distance post-pandemic, these tools will be quite useful to your team.
When the lockdowns started, we couldn’t help but emphasize the importance of security. Decentralised environment poses dangers, but it doesn’t mean we can’t work remotely. It just demands a higher level of security we now call zero trust—no one and nothing should be trusted. No business can be complacent when it comes to network security. Internal programs should work as usual when run outside your office but everything is authenticated and encrypted.
Listen to Business Built Freedom’s ‘COVID for Computers’ episode to learn more about the dangers of working from home and how to avoid them.
If you want to identify the vulnerabilities of your current remote work strategy, sign up for a free assessment.
Like work, exercise and entertainment are now done mostly at home.
While a few still prefer to go to gyms or run outside, many people now appreciate workout and fitness apps and websites. Business owners have realised the demand and started to turn to software developers to keep up with the shift in how people get products and services.
Subscriptions for unlimited access to entertainment sites and apps are also in demand. Whatever your business is, it doesn’t have to stop running. Your customers are not gone, they’re just staying at home. You just have to start to think outside the box and take advantage of the available technology to make it happen.
With most stuff done online, cloud companies have been there when we needed them the most and demonstrated the benefits of technology during COVID-19. They expanded to absorb the demand from individuals and organisations that rely on technology for video conferencing, collaboration, and even entertainment. Just be aware of the Top 10 Cloud Computing Security Issues and Challenges and take precautionary measures.
We don’t know how long this shift in technology will last after COVID-19, but we know for sure that some technologies are thriving and helping many businesses survive these days. Some of these technologies are likely to be around and in demand for a very long time even after post-lockdown as some companies have realized that they don’t really need to require some or all of their employees to report to the office every day.
Are you embracing remote work? Do you know some quite useful tools that we forgot to include here? Let us know.
Do you need help with technology for remote work and securing your team’s home network? Contact us for tech solutions starting at $1 to achieve more with less.
[module-379]
Do you work remotely?
A few weeks ago, Renier from VoIPstudio explained the difference between VoIP and a traditional phone system, the benefits of a cloud-based phone system, using a normal phone with VoIP, keeping your current business number when switching to VoIP, the disadvantages of VoIP, and comparing different VoIP phone systems. If you haven’t listened to that, jump onto VoIP 101 With Renier Schrenk or continue below to learn more about the things that you need to keep in mind to make sure that it does appear as if the business is as usual when your phone systems are now abroad or potentially distributed between many places.
Renier: The main thing is you want a system that moves along well that you can pack up into a laptop take it somewhere else. And with that, the whole cloud-based solution means that everything is kind of already in the cloud in one place ready to go, and you just connect to it. If someone calls up, it’s not being forwarded somewhere. It’s not going to someone’s cell phone number, it’s still going through the system, so you have all of your messages, you can have your call recording style, and you can still transfer calls as if you were in a normal office.
There are lots of different types of VoIP and lots of types of phone systems, such as IDSN, IP PBX, VoIP systems, cloud systems, on-premise systems, hybrid systems, systems that have trunking, and SIP trunking. The list goes on. What’s the easiest way to drill it down and simplify it?
Renier: Many countries have made promises to shut down ISDN because it’s old infrastructure and it’s becoming redundant to an extent. Some countries have said that they’ll do that in 2020 and others in 2030. IP PBX is basically the same concept, but it’s a completely digital system, so that’s also still something that you have in the office, but it’s a bit more versatile.
You can also get a free PBX, for example, and you can run that from a normal PC. Even if you have a small requirement, you can use something like a Raspberry Pi to put on your little PBX on. That’s a digital system that runs through the Internet. It’s a cloud-based system that backs all of that equipment up and puts it on a server run by the cloud provider. This means you don’t have any hardware that you need to worry about. You just need to worry about your connection to that server.
That’s a pretty big difference when you think about it. Traditionally, PBX systems came with this bulky package of hardware. Businesses were paying thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars, locked in contracts for years and years and ultimately kind of just felt like that’s the way that they had to do it.
A lot of people aren’t aware of how easy it is just to move across to a cloud system that allows you to remotely work and allows you to have a distributed office without any of that hardware. Imagine that you decide to move office from X to Y, especially if we’re looking at commercial real estate in Australia and the way that it’s working at the moment. You wonder what’s it going to cost to move everything. The beautiful thing is you can move your office two, three, or five times and there’s going to be nearly no business interruption.
Renier: Exactly right. Our team started working from home a long time ago because our very solution allows for that. So why not utilise it? And ultimately, even us as a company, we’ve saved money because we’re a company with global focus. So you need people in different places, different countries, that speak different languages. So now we can have a team member in the US, for example, which didn’t need us to buy up a property or rental property or something so that that person can have an office. You just ship hardware that they need and you’re done. Most of the things that you use already are probably cloud-based, so you might as well move your phone system too.
It definitely gives you flexibility, and it shouldn’t be something that you’re too scared about as well. It sounds like I’m spruiking VoIPstudio, but it’s just a product that we’ve come to love. We’ve tried lots of others out there, and you could probably do it yourself without having to have any other technical expertise.
Renier: Depends on the scale and how quickly you really need it. If you hustle, you can be done in a day. The main thing that takes time is migrating over to a different VoIP provider. But usually, you can have everything set up beforehand. Again, that just depends on the scope.
‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.’
– Benjamin Franklin
With VoIP, you’re not going to be up shit creek without a paddle. It’s not going to be the end of the world. It’s not going to be that hard. It’s not like you have to learn a whole bunch of other things. I’m happy to say that VoIP should have come through and done really well with us and the other businesses that we’ve been working with.
Nearly 10 years ago, Brisbane had huge floods. As an IT provider, I was asked to quickly go into Brisbane against all the rules that we’re being put in to help people remove servers and critical infrastructure. Now, the good news is for most of our customers, we didn’t have to do that because we already had the computers and other bits and pieces backed up.
The bad news is we weren’t doing phone systems. It wasn’t a part of something that we did. And VoIP definitely hadn’t really had the legs that it has now 10 years ago in Australia. And that meant that they pretty much lost their phones. They had to be on the phone to Telstra to be able to get the phones diverted to their mobiles. It was huge havoc.
Now, let’s imagine the floods happened again (hopefully, they don’t). The desk phone that you’re using, if it’s already connected to a cloud-hosted PBX system, you can just unplug that phone, take it home, plug that phone in and you’re up and running. Is that right?
Renier: Yep. And even if you hadn’t said anything up yet, go into your browser log and change whatever setting you want. Now you’re forwarding goes to wherever you need it or download the app on your smartphone. Now it’s ringing in your pocket. Download the app on your laptop, log in and you’re done. And you don’t have to contact anyone for that.
One of the things I want to talk about a cloud-based VoIP phone system is for when you’ve got a distributed office already. Let’s say you’ve got some people over in the Philippines, India, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, or the UK. As businesses are growing, more and more people are working from around the place. This gives them access to be within your own infrastructure, potentially available to do inbound or outbound calls to clients that are fully recorded with all the analytics injected into your CRM systems. Is that correct?
Renier: Yeah, you can definitely do that. For some businesses, they need that 24-hour coverage, either for inbound calls or for outgoing calls. Because you can have everybody on the same system, all of your data, all of your billing, everything is in one place. If there is some kind of disaster somewhere in the world, like an office somewhere either loses its connection completely due to a natural disaster or a damaged data centre, calls can be redirected to other teams in order to pick up that slack.
If you’re in a business where you have this very elastic team, it’s a fantastic option because you can go from having two people working with you to two hundred in two days and then really two minutes and then back down to two the following month.
Renier: Not all providers work the same way. Some contracts don’t always allow for such flexibility, so it’s just something to consider. But like most monthly rolling contract things, if you suddenly need someone, you add them, you pay, you move on. When you don’t need them anymore, you move them. You don’t pay for them anymore. We used to have a system where if you don’t need to use it anymore, you need to delete them. Now we’re a little bit different. If you need it in the future, instead of having to enter all of the data that you might need from scratch, you just edit that user, make any changes you need to activate them.
That’s pretty cool. You also can also make sure they’re all staying professional on the phone as well, right?
Renier: That’s a feature we call barging. You can barge in on the call and either just listen, whisper in so your employee can hear you, but the caller can’t. You can take over the call and make it like a three-way conference. And then at any point in time, the listener can go back to either just listening or just completely disconnect the call if they need to do. We started implementing the system, we started incorporating it ourselves. That way, you can have your Level 1 or your frontline support assisted by main support without them having to take an entire call. And they can just inject and help with little bits of information.
A big part that a lot of VoIP providers don’t have that you should be considering when you’re looking around are the cool integrations that VoIP offer. There are so many integrations that you offer to further help any type of business improve what they do.
Renier: One of the big integrations that we did recently was Zapier. They automate things, but they do it in a very smart way. You can link to so many different devices or services.
It’s an incredibly powerful addition that definitely puts VoIP Studio above the competition by a significant magnitude.
Renier: It does it in a very simple and complex way, in a sense, because it only points and basically manages all this information.
It’s very, very cool. It means that if you don’t have an integration or you’re using sort of a very bespoke product for your CRM system, Zapier is a tool that will most likely build an integration before anyone else.
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Learn more about the no-hassle VoIP phone service for business. Go to VoIPstudio or call 07 3166 5465 now!
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I hope everyone out there has got a lot more knowledge around how you can work remotely with VoIP, what to do when disaster strikes, how to integrate and use VoIP in a way that lets it be more than a phone system. I recommend that you jump straight across to VoIPstudio.com and sign up for a trial.
Renier: Yep. We don’t want a credit card. We don’t have any obligation after the trial is done. We’re reasonable people.
There’s no reason why to not try it. You can’t break anything. You’re not going to stuff it up. It’s not the end of the world. They’ve got a fantastic support team that’s going to be there to help you out.
Renier: We have a live chat and a support ticket system. Anybody that signs up will get a welcome email from us. Just reply to that and someone will be there to help as soon as we can.
Thanks, Reiner. I hope everyone learnt about the benefits of VoIP for remote workers.
If you have suggestions for new episodes, send an email to [email protected]. Stay healthy, stay good.
Need help with VoIP or other technologies for your business? Contact us and keep it business as usual with $1 tech deals.
[module-379]
Have you ever used your phone to make a call over the Internet instead of a regular phone line? If, you’ve used a VoIP system. VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, which means that instead of sending your voice over a traditional phone line, it travels through the Internet.
Renier Schrenk from VoIPstudio joined Josh for a deep dive into VoIP Systems to explain how they might help your business. (more…)
We’re in unreal, crazy times at the moment, and it has to be said that a lot of people are regretting their move to the cloud.
A lot of people are loving it as well because they’re going, “Huh, you know what? Sweet, I’m in the cloud. This is great! I can access everything from home. It is good.”
The problem with cloud migration, especially when the lockdown started and everybody started working from home, is the loads increased by about 300%, not just 10% or 20% or 30%. That means we’ve seen lots of core business go up and down, which is something that wouldn’t happen if business owners spent the money on business-grade Internet connections and kept their infrastructure local.
Having said that, if you have made the decision to move to the cloud, it’d be a very sensible idea to make sure that you’ve got localised copies that you can set to schedule to download at night.
Whether that’s through Dropbox, OneDrive or anything like that, make sure you go out, buy bigger drives, and have everything copied locally. That way, it’s going to be much, much quicker when you go and open up that document.
If you want to make sure things are staying nice, quick, and efficient, these are things that you need to be keeping in mind and doing.
Keep a localised copy of the data. This has become even more important since we started seeing Internet outages and blackouts across Australia and also on an international scale.
Keep your data local and make sure you have backups. If you don’t know where your remote workforce is backing their data up to, find out. See what you can do to see where the files are going.
The Final Word
If something goes terribly wrong and your IT company blows up and disappears, where do you go to get your data backup? Where do you get all of your information?
Have a Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan in place so that you won’t ever lose data and if you do, you can easily retrieve it and avoid days or weeks of downtime.
If you’ve enjoyed this, make sure to jump across to iTunes, give us some love, and some feedback, and let us know what your thoughts are. Stay good and stay healthy.
Editor’s Note: This episode was originally published on 5th May 2020. It has been revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Need help with your data backup? Contact us for custom IT solutions for your small business.
[module-379]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
This strange, alien landscape is one of the many canyons of Utah. And as you might expect, they filmed a lot of movies down here, one of the most famous is the Planet of the Apes. In that film, Charlton Heston and his crew of astronauts, who were in hibernation for 2,000 years, ultimately crashed back on Earth, but they didn’t recognise their planet because it’s changed that much and because the apes have taken over.
As technology continues to develop, hacking has been unfortunately becoming extremely prevalent in the world of business. Every year, hacking cases are increasing, and security experts are providing constant warnings on new methods that are causing havoc. Fortunately, there are many ways to take precautionary actions to avoid any hacking instances, and there are plenty of media buying agencies doing their bit to protect clients’ work from being compromised. There are many ways to protect your organisation, but you need to be constantly up to date on what steps to follow. Here are some tips to protect your business’s security from hackers.
There are always new strategies to help you maximize your success rate, whether you are just starting your business or if you have been running one for quite some time. Consistent improvements to enhance your business are critical to its success and sustainability. The few things to consider are professional development, high-quality products and services, customer support, and reliable IT support. Always remember that no matter what category your business falls in, the most important measure to consider is to provide your employees and customers with extreme value. Providing value in the lives of your customers and employees is significant when thinking about creating lasting business success. This might be challenging at first but as long as you believe in your ability and with your technological foundation, everything will work as it is. In this episode, Madeline Clift talks about the most effective ways to enhance your business.
I’m all about automation. The one thing that everyone needs to do in their business is to automate. Mike from Chatbot Agency shares with us his fantastic product, a fantastic system, that allows you to create something that you would never have been able to do 20 or 30 years ago. He’s able to create the human conversation in a digital world.
How does technology help businesses? For 40 years, the CN Tower was the tallest structure on Earth.
Let’s talk about automation, how your business can be more automated and what automation means to everyone. What do you think automation is? What would you say automation is? Doing something once and not have to do it again. Removing repetition. Stuff happens without you having to do it. As long as it’s being monitored for and you’re told when it’s not doing the things that it should be doing. Taking care of certain processes, setting them and allowing them to happen.
Automation is a very used buzzword at the moment around the place. The important thing is you need to automate as much in your business as you can because if you don’t, your competitors will. And automation is happening all the time and innovation and technology is happening all the time.
We help businesses in Brisbane and across Queensland automate processes, reduce manual tasks, and improve efficiency. With tailored automation solutions, we make technology work smarter, so you can focus on growth.
Curious about how automation can transform your business? Let’s chat. Get a FREE Business Automation Consultation (normally $249) and discover how we can optimise your workflows and boost productivity.
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