Anton Nagov, Head of Business Development of the Cloud Technology Department of Softline, tells about the specifics and benefits of Softline Virtual Office.
— Anton, what is Softline Virtual Office?
— It's a cloud environment ensuring individual work and collaboration of all the company's employees. The best thing about this service is that you can focus on work and business development without spending time and resources to solve problems related to in-house telecom infrastructure deployment and maintenance.
— What are the components of this service?
— Softline Virtual Office includes corporate email powered by Microsoft Exchange Server, a unified communication solution (IM, video- and audiocalls) based on Skype for business, integration with PSTN via a SIP operator, and antivirus/antispam. Moreover, it is possible to rent a full suite of local Microsoft Office applications for offline work.
— What is the target audience for Virtual Office, and why?
— Virtual Office will be especially useful to geographically distributed businesses or companies with remote employees. Thanks to this service, geographically distributed employees can interact with each other without any problems, using a unified environment for document sharing, storage, management, and transfer, as well as for coordinating their teamwork.
Quickly growing companies will also be very interested in the high scaling potential of Virtual Office. The service will also be useful to companies with an extensive chain of sales representatives or out-of-staff employees: it boosts communication effectiveness, helping to organize remote education, conduct meetings, and online presentations.
All financial and labor costs for telecom equipment maintenance, hardware update, and scheduled maintenance now lie in the Virtual Office’s operator area of responsibility.
The service suits for businesses of any size.
— How does Softline Virtual Office differ for small, medium, and large businesses?
— The implementation technology is determined based on the size of the customer company. For example, multi-tenant architecture is optimal for SMBs. In this case, several small customers use the same infrastructure.
This approach has some limitations in fine-tuning and integration with customer systems: the same policies are applied to all tenants, the same changes are made, and the entire infrastructure is managed by our company. As you can see, this technology is feasible for small and medium companies only.
Large companies can get a standalone solution installed on a dedicated architecture. Here you can get more Softline services, fine-tune the security policies, connect additional services, and flexibly integrate this system into the existing IT infrastructure.
— Why do companies need Virtual Office, and what are its benefits?
— First of all, it’s the financial aspect: reduction of maintenance expenses, software costs, and mitigation of licensing risks.
All software provided through the service is updated almost immediately after the release of new versions. All solutions—both from Microsoft and our partners—are licensed.
Virtual Office fully meets the Russian laws on personal data protection, because the information is stored and processed on servers located in Russia.
Another benefit is the technical support service. Guaranteed response time for the user’s request is 15 minutes. We offer round-the-clock technical support in 24/7/365 mode, which solves all problems in the required terms.
