[Business Advice] Which Cloud Storage Service to Use – and Don’t Bring Cellphones to Meetings

Transcript

TTWCP-DAILY-49_2017-03-09_Business Advice

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/09/2017
Business Advice – Which Cloud Storage Service – Dropbox Box Microsoft Onedrive Compared – Don’t Bring Cellphones to Meetings
Craig Peterson: Hi, Craig Peterson here and it’s time for another TechSanity check. Today we got two different things I wanna talk about pretty quickly here and both issues that I’ve seen with business. First of all, we’re gonna talk about cellphone use. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but kids are always on their cellphones, you know, their smartphones and their typing away. Nowadays, so are adults. So we’ll talk a little bit about what problems that is causing in the workplace. And then also, pretty quick little one here too. If you’re a business and you are using files and sharing files, there’s a few alternatives out there. I’ve been selling Dropbox and Box to my clients over the years. But there’s been some very major changes in that space as we’ve seen Microsoft enter something else that we’ve been selling to our clients. So I’ve got experience with all of those. So we’ll talk about what might be the best cloud service for file-sharing for your business right here. Stick around. Here we go.

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Well first off I wanna talk about meetings. We have meetings all of the time. As you probably know. I have employees that are US based in the Northeast, in fact, all over the country. I have employees who are all the way over on the other side of the world and we have to meet. So, how do we meet? We go online, and of course I try and have as few people as possible in the meeting, right? That just plain old makes sense. Why waste people’s time in meetings when they don’t need to be there? Well, one of the problems I’ve seen much less so in my virtual meetings, but certainly in physical meetings has to do with companionship, interaction, compassion, understanding. And here’s why. You know time-wise we would go to a meeting and the meeting would start. We’d all try to be there a little bit early. And we’d meet each other in the hallway. We might grab a cup of coffee. You know, the old water cooler type thing. And we talk. You know, hey John. How are the kids? Mary, what have you been up to lately? What are you guys doing this weekend? You wanna try and maybe grab a round of golf, do the back 9 this Sunday? You know those types of discussions. And what does that do? Well, that used to build rapport. It allowed us to be able to understand the other person a little bit better and appreciate them for being a human being, right? They weren’t just some article that we read on a blog. They weren’t just email that we get from time to time. They were a real person with a real face.

Now what’s happening in today’s world and this really came in with the millennials. It’s not their fault, right? Millennials have been raised with these smartphones with computers with all these devices. But the fault frankly is the older generations. It’s us. It’s the fact that we’re going in now to the meeting. Maybe we grabbed a cup of Starbucks on the way in to work in the morning. We’re not going to that coffee station. And then we’re sitting down around the conference table, we all pull out our phones. And we’re all doing various things. Maybe we’re involved for the company with social media so we got to check social media. Maybe we’re just checking our emails under a little bit of ketchup because we’ve had a very, very busy morning. Maybe we’re checking up on the kids. Maybe, you know, there’s something that came across in messages from the family. The list goes on and on. Nowadays, we can monitor the kids. Where they’re at. So we double check the kids, see where they’re at. What’s on the schedule? Put something in that calendar. You’re doing stuff that’s, you know, I get it. I understand it’s important to you. It could be important to your family. It could be important to the company. But the problem that I’m starting to see in, I’ve got some psychiatrists now and sociologists who’ve been talking about this and you know, articles I’ve been reading, is that we are just not communicating. Effectively, we’re not building relationships. So the meeting starts, we get right down to business coz we don’t wanna waste people’s time, right? And we’re now working on solving some problem in the business or setting something up. Some orientation.

So what do you do? How do you build that relationship? How do you build the rapport? How do you build the respect for them, as again, as a human being? Sure, you can see them. This isn’t the same as just texting back and forth and getting on Slack and sending some messages around. What this is is a face-to-face meeting but we don’t have the time. We’re not taking the time before the meeting or after the meeting or during the meeting to really get to know each other and going around the table. Everyone introducing themselves and saying what’s happening with their family, etcetera, is not going to cut it. So I have a suggestion. Make sure that any meeting that you’re having there in the business is something obviously that’s important. That you’re not wasting time on. And also that you make sure that there are no smartphones. No devices there in the meeting. At least that’s no one’s using them. Coz I get it, you know, tech support people need to be on-call 24/7. And they need to be able to answer when there is a serious problem. So, I get that part of it. But let’s just turn those off. Let’s make our life a little bit easier. Let’s make everybody’s life a little bit better.

Alright, let’s talk now about on the business side also, about using the cloud data services. And I’m saying that kinda generally. Coz there’s quite a number of them. But let’s get more specific about the cloud storage services. There are a lot out there. There have been a lot. That’s a business I am seriously thinking about getting into before any of these upstarts came about. And now, of course, there’s been major shake-ups in the industry and there’s just a few major players left. In fact, there’s a new one out there that’s a major player. We’ll talk about them as well.

So my company, Mainstream, we sell all kinds of services. We do a lot of managed services and one of the things that we’ve been selling more recently in and installing is not the process is they have a problem, we come and we try to solve it and nowadays, most businesses really want to get on the cloud services to solve some of the problems that they’ve had for many years. Maintaining infrastructure and trying to hire the people to maintain that infrastructure can be almost impossible since the salaries are just so high. And if you’re a small company you can’t afford it. So what do you do? Well, you move to the cloud. How do you share files? In the past, most of us were using the file server and I still do. We still have it but that doesn’t work so well in many cases. It doesn’t work for most of our employees because most of the people who work for me are all over the place. They could be at a client’s site. They could be at their home or they could be in one of our many offices that are located all over the place. So how do you have a central one file server? You can’t. You don’t.

So nowadays, many businesses are switching on over to some of these cloud-based file sharing, kind of file server services. Microsoft has one that we use. I’ve set it up for a clinic of doctors and it’s a pain clinic. And they’re using the OneDrive from Microsoft as part of this whole high-level, Office 365. It’s not the normal stuff you buy as a consumer but it’s designed for medical practices or HIPAA compliance and everything else. So right there you’ve got to win because it is designed for medical practices and medical practices have all kinds of requirements that nobody else does. So OneNote’s got to win there. OneNote is very, very difficult to use in some cases and file sharing can be confusing and difficult. And Microsoft is the new player in the block in this space.

So they’ve got a solution that’s pretty decent. And it’s integrated with the larger Office 365 packages. Box, is a player that’s been around there a long time. Now I’ve been using Box with one of our multinational customers. They’re one of these Fortune 500 companies. We set it up for them. It allows them to communicate with their vendors with specifications. It allows their clients to give them the specs that they need. Then they go ahead and design and manufacture what’s needed. So they use Box back and forth. It’s rather secure. It’s designed with security in mind. And it allows them to do what all these solutions do which is share files with anyone, anywhere, anytime. And that’s a huge, huge win. And also keep the security level that you need so that your intellectual property doesn’t get stolen. So that it doesn’t walk out the door with maybe a sales guy who is upset with you or some engineers upset. You can put some good controls on it.

So Box, very mature. And very good for those types of things. Then there’s Dropbox. Now, Dropbox has been something that I wasn’t particularly interested in dealing with for many years. Yeah, ok. I’ve used Dropbox for many, many, many years just for small, personal stuff. So, you know already that I use 1Password as my password manager. So I had it encrypt all of the password master files and use Dropbox so that it’d share them between all my devices. And that’s worked out really well for me. Well, Dropbox has not, I think, surpassed Box with its security, with its flexibility, and with its ease of use. So I’ve been recommending to clients and in fact, I’ve just put Dropbox up for one of our, another medical client. This one’s a dentist. So they’re using Dropbox now, and in secure ways to keep all of their files synchronized.

Now Dropbox has a very neat new feature that allows you to still have files appear on your machine. Coz here’s the problem I’ve had, you’ve had, everybody’s had, and that is that your laptop has limited space. So how do you deal with these synchronized files? A lot of times, what you do is you just go to the web page. You download, you work on the files, and you re-upload them. And that gets inconvenient and also causes problems because you sometimes forget to grab the latest version, you forgot to upload it and somebody grabbed the wrong version. Made some other changes and now you have conflicts, right? It becomes a real problem. So what Dropbox has done with their latest release here that we’re using for business and that we’re supporting is that you can have kind of a virtual disk on your machine, it’s your laptop, it’s your desktop, it doesn’t matter. It will see all of the files as though they are local to your machine. But they’re not. They’re stored in the cloud. So now you essentially have an unlimited disk. How’s that for amazing? And then that disk, if you access a file, will automatically download the latest version of that file from the cloud, from Dropbox, it’ll put it into your machine so that when you’re opening up that file, it isn’t really there, it will download and then whatever you’re using, if you’re using Pages on you Mac or if you’re using Word on your Mac or your PC, whatever it might be, that application opens up file. It’s paused a little bit, waiting for the file to download and now you’re editing the file locally and it’s being synchronized with cloud.

So some very good things there. I like what Dropbox is doing and so we signed up as a reseller just last year for their new services. They also have a very cool note-keeping service that’s new, that allows you to have multiple people editing documents at the same time, notes at the same time. They have a product that competes very well with Evernote. And it’s Microsoft by the way. Their OneNote product is very good as well but we’ll talk about those another day. Hope you have a great day and enjoyed today’s daily. Make sure you visit online, http://CraigPeterson.com. Subscribe to the newsletter. We have all kinds of great stuff coming up here as we’ve putting together some e-books to help you understand the technology. Have a great day and we will chat with you tomorrow. Bye-bye.

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Show Notes:

There are two different things to talk about that concerns businesses today.

First, is all about mobile phones and how it may post problems in the workplace. Then, we’ll find out more about what would be the best file sharing cloud service that is available in the market for businesses.

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