A Field Report from the Cloud: Part I - The BenefitsΒΆ
This developer blog article was originally published on MetaCommunication’s website in December, 2009 and explores the benefits and questions about working with Workgroups Online.
The original article is no longer accessible on MetaCommunication’s website, but the text has been preserved below.
This is the first of a two part series that explores the benefits and questions about working from the cloud with Workgroups Online. The second part of this series covers common questions asked by customers and will be published in my next report.
Workgroups Online
Over the past few months, I’ve been working a lot from the cloud helping out some clients who are using Workgroups 2010 Online, our cloud-hosted solution. For those unfamiliar with it, this is the “cloud” based version of the same Workgroups suite of products (Job Manager, Virtual Ticket, Approval Manager, and Digital Storage Manager) that may be purchased and installed in a local environment. As my hands-on experience with this solution has grown and I’ve been exposed to more and more feedback from customers who are using it, I’ve come to better understand the conveniences that working from the cloud with Workgroups has to offer customers during the development, support, and use of their solution.
If you are considering moving to Workgroups 2010 online, you’ll be interested and surprised to see what I’ve learned. Some of the most significant benefits reported by the customers I’ve worked with include:
Increased Connectivity
This is the most frequently reported benefit that customers have communicated to me, especially by those who use Workgroups across multi-site offices. Since it is in the cloud, everyone has easy access to their solution, regardless of their location. I also repeatedly hear from customers how much more convenient it is to access their Workgroups system from home, while traveling on business, and from the myriad of other places they discovered they could work from. As someone who has had to deal with the headaches of limited VPN connectivity, special routing configurations, and corporate firewalls for most of his adult life, I share this enthusiasm for the ability to easily connect from virtually anywhere, be it home, the branch office, or the local coffee shop.
Reduced Capital Costs
For some customers using Workgroups online, this is a non-issue. For others, however, it is paramount for one of two reasons I’ve been able to discern so far:
The first is that for some customers it is simply easier to get approval for the monthly subscription fee for Workgroups Online than it is to get approval for a single capital expenditure to purchase and install Workgroups locally.
The second has been unique to one customer so far, but it may come up again in the future so it’s worth mentioning here: In one particular customer’s case, they actually had a preference for purchasing Workgroups for local installation. They had the departmental funds for the software available, but their IT group did not have extra capacity to host it and was hesitant to purchase and support additional OS and MS SQL Server licenses. Because of this, Workgroups Online was the solution for the customer, even though they initially anticipated hosting it in-house.
Reduced Maintenance/Configuration
Of all the application solutions I’ve worked with, Workgroups probably has one of the smallest maintenance and configuration footprints I’ve seen. Our engineers have put countless hours into streamlining the server installation, setup, backup, and upgrade processes, and I can’t credit them enough for their efforts. Nevertheless, Workgroups is still mission-critical software for most customers that use it. This means it’s someone’s responsibility to install and configure the solution, make sure it gets backed up regularly, is configured correctly for the local environment, updates are applied, etc...
By moving to the cloud, much of this overhead simply disappears: the IT group doesn’t have to worry about finding a server to use, installing the software, making sure the client connectivity is configured, backup routines are set, etc.... It’s effectively all taken care of by MetaCommunications and the cloud.
There are more benefits than those I’ve described above, but these three seem to be most frequently expressed by the customers who are using Workgroups Online. The next part of this two-part series, A Field Report from the Cloud Part II - Common Questions, will answer frequently asked questions about working from the cloud. I’m putting the finishing touches on that article now, but if you have any questions about working from the cloud that you’d like me to address, please feel free to ask them in the comments or in the forums and I’ll do my best to work them in.