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5 Benefits of Wireless Presentations

September 12, 2016

If a time traveler from the year 2005 were to set foot in your living room, they would have a hard time figuring out your home entertainment system. Apple TV? Netflix? How are you supposed to insert the DVD into the Apple TV box when the DVD is nearly twice the size of the box? And how come this remote control only has one button on it? Has the world gone crazy?

And yet if that same time traveler were to set foot in your conference room, they would be completely at home. Although business meetings rely on pretty much the exact same technology as home entertainment (TVs, projectors, media to play on said TVs and projectors), many meeting rooms are still stuck in the Blockbuster era, relying on HDMI, VGA, and countless other cables and adapters for their presentation solution.

Things don’t have to be this way. With a wireless presentation system such as the Ubiq Hive, you can bring your conference room into the Netflix/Apple TV-era and briefly confuse any time travelers that happen to wander in.

Here are just some of the benefits:

1. Easy Set-up.

Have you ever successfully plugged an electronic device into a wall socket such as a vacuum cleaner or hair dryer? Then you shouldn’t have any trouble setting up the Ubiq Hive. Once the device is powered on and connected to your conference room TV or projector, all you have to do is download the Ubiq app or go to present.goubiq.com and you can begin streaming right away.

2. Less Strain on IT.

Like E.R. doctors, IT people are always on-call in case of an emergency. If a project manager is having issues hooking up his 2008 MacBook to a projector, the first person to hear about it is usually the system admin, who is then expected to drop everything he’s doing and rush into the conference room and try to diagnose the problem.

With Ubiq, however, IT does not need to be physically present in the conference room. To monitor a presentation, all you have to do is log in to the Ubiq dashboard.

3. Increased Productivity.

Ubiq integrates with calendar tools (like Google Calendar) so teams can schedule meetings, reserve rooms, and request “hive” access. It also allows IT to post notifications and digital signage to meeting room displays in order to help teams stay organized.

4. Security.

The Ubiq application ensures that internal users stream over the corporate network and guest users stream over the guest network. Since Ubiq integrates with your company’s Active Directory, internal users do not need to create their own accounts. Simply enter your Active Directory domain during installation and Ubiq will check credentials against the domain.

5. Better Looking Conference Rooms.

Wires are ugly, and hiding them is difficult. Some people try to run them behind their baseboards or under their carpets, but few succeed. This is especially true if we’re dealing with multiple cables like HDMI, VGA, HDMI to VGA, DVI, and Thunderbolt (which is the bare minimum of what you’ll need to have on-hand in today’s BYOD era in lieu of a wireless solution). Hiding that many cables is like trying to hide 6% of the world’s aluminum in the Mexican desert; it’s only a matter of time before it shows up on Reddit.

Discover how Ubiq can work for your organization. Request a demo today!

Want to set up a wireless Conference Room?Try Now

Getting Your Employees to Stop Looking at Cat Photos: A Preliminary Overview

August 31, 2016

Bored employees are very seldom productive employees. A business whose employees are passionate and excited about the company’s mission is likely to get more work done in a typical day than a company whose employees require an hourly trip to the coffee shop just to stay awake. While technology has delivered productivity tools to keep employees on task and blocking tools to keep them off Facebook and Reddit, an employee who is determined to look at cute cat pictures during work hours is going to find a way to do so. How can IT manage the influx of personal use of company technology?

Salary.com’s Time at Work Study in 2014 found the following:

89% of employees waste at least 30 minutes a day

53% believed that time “wasted” promotes greater overall productivity

27% of employers block non work-related websites

Here are 3 ways IT can work to rein in personal use at work:

Optimize your BYOD policy. Can bringing a personal device to work help to reduce personal usage? Counterintuitively, yes! Working on a device that you know and love is a lot easier than working on one that’s been randomly assigned to you. The policy also has to take into account compatibility and accessibility by device type and security parameters. By ensuring your BYOD policy is flexible with changing technology, it promotes acceptance by employees.

Conduct productivity reviews. By partnering with Human Resources and other departments, you can evaluate the role of technology across your company. If technology is not being used as it should, you may uncover opportunities to have it work for your employees to grow your business.

Bring people together. IT can work to bring people together. For example, unified communication systems help to contain access and flow, while being open to new ways we share information. If personal use is found to be a way to break up the monotony of work, maybe we can use unified communication tools to bring people together to get excited about work.

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7 Tips For Stressed Out IT Managers

August 17, 2016

Like being a stock broker in the year 1929, being an IT manager in 2016 can be a pretty stressful gig: Your backend system is a complicated mixture of old and new applications that have been randomly pieced together from multiple vendors as a result of decades of acquisitions, Russian hackers are constantly trying to infect your system with malware in order to extort precious, precious Bitcoins, and Martha from accounting keeps trying to torrent The Force Awakens even though it’s been available on Netflix for at least two months now.

With so much on your plate, it can be hard to stay organized. Hopefully this 7 item priority list will make your job a little bit easier.

1. Manage Time. If a help desk ticket unexpectedly balloons into a 15-hour-long marathon session, your team should inform you. You may need to find another team member or resource to assist.

2. Balance Human Resources. If your department is understaffed and you have deadlines that desperately need to be met, be careful not to push your team to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. That strategy didn’t work out so well for J.K. Simmonds in the movie Whiplash, and we doubt it will work out well for you. Create a simple spreadsheet that lists your employees and the current and upcoming projects they’re working on. It acts as visual representation to allow you to make the appropriate adjustments.

3. Monitor Usage. Dedicate time for you and your team to review the way technology is being used at your company. If you use Ubiq for wireless presentations, go to the Dashboard and study the usage logs. The information you find there could hold the key to improving meeting room productivity.

4. Security Check. As more and more companies are implementing BYOD policies and opening up their network to external teams, it is critical to make sure your infrastructure is protected from viruses and hacks. If your company has more than 100 employees, it’s safe to say that at least one of them has fallen for the trick popularized by Mr. Robot of leaving a USB stick out in the parking lot and hoping that an employee will plug it in on a company computer. Find out who it is and give them a stern talking to.

5. Team Check. As a leader, you need to check in with your team and talk to them about the work environment, their vision, and opportunities to grow the department. Make sure they stay engaged and motivated. If you sense their motivation is lagging, take them out to lunch or buy them coffee and try to boost their spirits.

6. Speak with Vendors. Chances are that your technology is not all “in-house.” Reach out to your vendors to address concerns, get updates on new releases/upgrades, and review performance and optimization. Those conversations should then be shared with your team to prepare for any new tasks or projects.

7. Benchmark Trends. Is it time to upgrade technology or implement something new? Look at the industry landscape for the latest hardware and software. If your company has the money, see if they’ll fly you out to one of this fall’s major tech conferences. You may not be able to make changes right away. However, it gives you an opportunity to create a roadmap with other departments, and set priorities and timelines in the future.

By following the steps on this checklist, it is our hope that your stress levels will go from that of a Great Depression-era stock broker to that of a Newfoundland fisherman circa 1535. But in the off-chance they don’t, there’s always diet and exercise. That almost always does the trick.

Additional Reading
Working In IT is Getting More Stressful
IT Stress: Management, Empathy, and the Kindness of Strangers
Most IT Admins Considering Quitting Due to Stress

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6 Things that are keeping your IT team away from their work

May 23, 2016

If you have ever had the pleasure to work on an IT team, you would have realized how overworked they are, how much time they have to spend doing tasks that are not really important or can be done by others if they have better training and understanding of system. There are several tasks that keep the IT team away from their work. Here are some of them:
1. Preventable incidents
Merely by educating the users better, a lot of time spent on dealing with preventable incidents can be saved. If only we could count the number of requests that an IT team receives on an average, we would know that a large percentage of them would never arise if the users were a little more aware of what they were doing. It makes sense for businesses to invest in user education and training rather than wasting valuable IT work hours each day in dealing with a bulk of requests that can be easily prevented.
2. Struggling with outdated equipment and software
Whenever there is a meeting or conference in the workplace, a member from the IT team is always summoned to make sure the laptop that the client/contractor has brought in to deliver the presentation connects with the projector, or that the virtual conferencing system works properly. With better and modern technology that supports BYOD, these tasks can be eliminated.
3. Manual tasks
In most organizations, one of the biggest challenges IT teams have to face is that a large quantity of tasks such as updates, software installations, enhancements etc. have to be done manually. This eats into a lot of valuable time for the IT people. By implementing solutions that assimilate these tasks, we can spare IT teams a lot of trouble and time.
4. Fire-fighting
Most IT people spend a large part of their day firefighting. Oftentimes, urgent issues such as a particular equipment not working, takes precedence over what is actually important. Although these sudden, unexpected events cannot be completely prevented, but there needs to a stronger focus on reducing the occurrence of such incidents.
5. Tasks that are out of their scope of duty
Given the talent and curiosity that IT teams possess, they frequently end up resolving issues that fall out of their scope of duty. This keeps them away from tasks that they should actually be performing.
6. Discretionary activities
In a research published in Harvard Business Review, PA Consulting Group productivity expert Jordan Cohen and London Business School professor Julian Birkinshaw indicate, “Our research indicates that knowledge workers spend a great deal of their time—an average of 41%—on discretionary activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled competently by others. So why do they keep doing them? Because ridding oneself of work is easier said than done.” According to this study, we tend to cling to tasks that make us feel busy and important, and for obvious reasons, the bosses pile on as many responsibilities as the workers are willing to accept. This happens with IT people as well. They end up having a lot more on their plate, and many of them are tasks that keep them away from their actual work.
This list is far from exhaustive. There are many other tasks that keep IT teams away from their work, and in order to make teams more productive, there needs be a larger focus on streamlining work processes better, training users, and investing in latest technology.

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Why Organizations Need To Modernize IT Right Now

March 30, 2016

According to a recent study, many companies are losing customers and revenue to their competitors for one major reason━failure to embrace modern IT and digital initiatives. The study conducted by the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network interviewed over 200 IT professionals from around the world. The study found that there is a significant performance gap between organizations that have embraced the digital business age and those that haven’t.
The problem isn’t that companies do not agree that they need technology. In fact, in the study, over 93 percent of respondents said that technology has become more important in the last five years. Another 45 percent admitted that their competitors had more to offer in terms of options, flexibility and accessibility because of their use of digital tech like wireless presentation software, collaboration tools and wearable devices. If organizations know that they are falling behind their competition by failing to modernize their IT, then why haven’t they upgraded yet?
According to an article by CIO.com, one of the major reasons is that organizations realize that they need to upgrade, but they don’t have the foundation to manage it successfully. What else do organizations need to launch successful IT modernization initiatives?
Strong Leadership from CIOs
As the tech leader of organizations, CIOs have the power to influence other executive leaders by helping them realize the advantages that modern IT can bring to each department. CIOs can make recruitment, retention and employee engagement efforts more efficient and effective for HR leaders. They can appeal to CEOs by highlighting how IT can improve overall business performance, competitiveness and generate new revenue streams.
If there isn’t already a strong interest in updating an organization’s tech, CIOs can build interest by stressing the benefits with evidence of the success that other businesses have experienced. However, one C-suite member leading the initiative usually isn’t sufficient to drive it to successful completion.
Support from the C-suite Team
When other executive members are involved in projects, they are more likely to be effective. In addition to the CIO, the CEO and the rest of the C-suite play important roles. According to an IBM study, the majority of CEOs recognize technology as one of the top external influences impacting their organization.
Company leaders like the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Chief Finance Officer (CFO) could greatly benefit by partnering with the IT department and using the latest tech. In order for initiatives to work, however, the silos that once separated departments need to be broken down. Executives need to collaborate and discuss tech projects and planning.
Clear Vision, Goals and Planning
A strong team is crucial to IT success, but ultimately, it needs to be paired with a plan of action. Organizations need to identify their technology needs and opportunities to improve efficiency, employee engagement and other performance factors. Then, they can start building a step-by-step plan that is designed to meet those goals.

Each day that a company puts off upgrading their technology and infrastructure, they are losing revenue and time. On average, it takes one to two years to update IT, so organizations can’t afford to wait. Failure to do so soon could put your business too far behind competitors to catch up.

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