Connected Office is a service suite that empowers people to operate, communicate and manage their small and medium business more effectively. Figure 1 below provides an overview of the various components of Connected Office.

Figure 1 - Connected Office Service Suite

Our current release, Connected Office 2.0, focuses primarily on Operations and Communications services, and is supported by our Utility Service Center remote support portal. A detailed service roadmap is available upon request.

At a macro level, our view is that the purpose of technology is to empower people to be more effective and productive in achieving the objectives for a business. By viewing technology from this perspective, there are three key outputs from technology for a business:

• Operations - provides the ability to execute on daily tasks in a highly efficient manner.
• Communications - provides the ability to communicate information about your business to customers, prospects and other stakeholders.
• Management - provides the ability to better manage the key cycles and components of a business.

In this context, there are five major businesses processes that technology can improve:

• Sales
• Customer service
• Marketing
• Human resources
• Purchasing/budgeting

To achieve on the goal of connecting the office, our philosophy is that mission critical services, such as Exchange, business applications and data protection should typically be virtualized (hosted). Any company under 100 employees should typically have a network only for collaboration (communication), to print, and to get access to the Internet - all other infrastructure and applications should generally be centralized at a utility. This reduces onsite support down to the desktop, thus greatly reducing ongoing support costs along with large technology infrastructure and software expenditures.