Thinking of adopting a "bring your own device", or BYOD, policy at work? Learn more about what it is, why it's becoming popular – and what you need to consider before rolling it out.

You may have noticed more and more of your employees or colleagues bringing their own computing devices to work—be it their mobile phone, tablet, or laptop. Or perhaps in your company or in other companies you may have seen, they have let people decide which device they prefer because they are used to it at home. You may not realize it, but this is all part of a large trend called the "consumerization" of IT, in which the influence of consumer technology is being increasingly felt in the workplace. With the wide availability of cheap but powerful mobile devices and online services, a growing number of people are being exposed to the latest technology at home first—adopting them at a rate faster than most businesses are able to manage. This flips on its head the old paradigm in which traditionally new technologies would be rolled out to businesses first, before they would find their way to consumers.

This trend, plus the increasing sophistication of young workers today and their frustration with the tools available to them at the office, is pushing some companies to adopt a "bring your own device" or BYOD policy at work. They are not alone. According to research by technology analyst group Gartner, end users, not the IT department, will soon be responsible for 50 percent of business IT procurement decisions—ultimately bringing and running their own systems on company networks. Meanwhile, according to management consultants Accenture, around one-third of today's younger generation of workers (a group called "millenials") not only wants to use the computer of their choice at work, but also wants control of the applications they use too.

The benefits companies cite to adopting a BYOD policy are many, among them:

• Savings on capital expenses and training costs in using company equipment—compensating employees instead via other means such as flexible work hours, subsidized purchases, insurance, and other benefits.
• Less management headache—effectively letting employees decide what to use releases the company from some overhead and management responsibilities.
• Improved employee satisfaction—by giving employees the freedom to use devices and applications that they prefer.

However, before you consider letting employees bring their own personal technology to the work place, be aware that there are also disadvantages, and sometimes very real dangers in doing so. These include:

• Non-standardization of hardware, operating systems, and applications. If your business operations require that some equipment is integrated with others, then BYOD can in the long run actually increase IT management costs and decrease efficiency.
• Exposing your network to malware or security vulnerabilities and breaches. When your employees bring their own devices to work, you lose important control over their security. Consumer devices often don't employ comparable bullet-proof security technologies mandated by businesses.
• Leakage of confidential or proprietary information. Employees will naturally do what they want with the data on their devices, even if it doesn't belong to them, or it's against company policies. Employees can also lose precious company data when they misplace or damage their personal devices.
• Lower economies of scale in procurement. Essentially because everyone is buying devices on their own, you miss out on the chance to consolidate purchases and lower purchase costs for everybody.

Have you adopted a BYOD policy at work? Thinking about it? Worried about this trend? If you need to understand BYOD better so you can define a policy for your staff, contact us and see how we can help.

We at Micro Doctor are continuously striving to improve our availability and service levels to our clients.  To that end this article will provide information on the best ways to reach us and what happens when you do. By providing this information, we hope to help set expectations of what you can expect to happen on a service call and help you communicate with our service staff.

There are a number of ways to reach us to report a service need. You can e-mail us at support@microdoctor.com, call us at (330) 898-2100, or enter a service request on our customer service Web portal at the following link Customer Service Web Portal. For our Managed Services clients, we also have an additional direct phone line that bypasses all call attendants and lights up the phones of everyone in our office.

By far, the quickest and easiest way to request service is to simply send an e-mail to support@microdoctor.com. Upon receipt, our Connectwise service provider management software identifies who you are by the return e-mail address in your message. It then creates a service ticket, populates it with appropriate identifying information and your description of the problem.  It is then placed directly in our triage queue without human intervention.  Within 15 minutes, our dispatcher will review the ticket, ensure that it contains all the information we need to successfully address it, ensure that it is set to the appropriate priority, and place it in the schedule of the appropriate technician in the next available time slot.  You will receive an e-mail notification when it is received into our system and when it is scheduled for service.  If you have concerns about the priority, the schedule timing, or anything else in the ticket, feel free to call our dispatcher at (330) 898-2100  x100 at any time to resolve your concerns.

The Micro Doctor Customer Service Web portal, among other things, provides our clients the ability to instantly enter a service request that follows the same procedure outlined above.  The advantage of using the portal is that you are presented with many more choices to clarify and prioritize your request.  Access to the portal is free for all active clients and you can also check the status of all active tickets, review previous service issues, invoices, and view service related reports/trends. If you don’t know your credentials to the portal, you can e-mail or call us.  We would be happy to provide them to you.

If you call our main phone number to enter your service request, you can simply press 2 to be connected to our service and support department. The person you speak with will ask you for appropriate information to populate your service request and enter it for you. It will then follow the same process outlined above.

Once the appointment time for your service arrives, the next steps it takes depends on whether it is an “on-site” request, or a “remote service” request. If on-site, the technician will have already changed the ticket from a status of Scheduled to a status of Enroute while they drive from their previous location to yours. Upon arrival, the technician will change the ticket status from Enroute to In-Progress. You will receive an e-mail at each of these status changes so you know when the technician is on the way and when they have arrived at your facility.

If your issue can be addressed remotely, the technician will change the ticket’s status from Scheduled to In-Progress once they start working on it. You will receive an instant e-mail notification of this change. If the technician requires additional information or needs to remotely access your computer, they will call you at this time to get the information or permission to access your machine. During business hours, we will always call to get permission to access your computer before doing so. After business hours, we assume there is nobody on your computer and will access it as necessary without calling unless your company has specified that we should not have unaccompanied access. In any case everything we do while logged on to your PC is tracked and documented in a log file on your PC automatically.

As your issue is being resolved, the technician will be continually documenting the actions they are taking to accomplish resolution of your issue. They will also be saving any documents generated, credentials used, or people contacted during resolution for future review. You can view most of this documentation by logging into the Micro Doctor Customer Service Web portal and either looking at the specific ticket or performing a search of your proprietary knowledgebase on the portal. This will search only information generated for your company and not other clients.

If the technician requires additional information during the course of service and they can’t reach you by phone or e-mail, they will change the ticket status to “Waiting on Client”. This means that we require additional information to move forward and you will be notified by e-mail of this status change. If you receive a “Waiting on Client” notice, please contact our office as soon as is convenient to expedite resolution of your issue. If we don’t hear from you for an extended time, we will continue to try to contact you.

Once the technician has resolved your issue, they will change the ticket to a status of “Completed”. This triggers a number of activities. It sends you an e-mail to let you know of the completion and gives you an opportunity to comment or respond. The status change also notifies our service manager and dispatcher that this work has been completed so they can begin their processes of reviewing the work to ensure that it was completed properly and that all stated goals of the service were accomplished. Once these reviews are completed, the ticket will be changed to a status of “Closed”. You will also be notified of this to give you an additional chance to comment.

The notifications that you receive can be customized on a company by company basis. Most companies like to watch the progress of their service requests, but if the e-mails become too much for you, we can configure our system to not notify you on some or all status changes as you wish.

After your service ticket is closed, all of the documentation generated during the course of the engagement is automatically collected and a subset is presented to you on your invoice.

So there it is…. The anatomy of a Micro Doctor service call. I know this process seems complex and time consuming, but in actuality, 95% of it is automated. It has allowed us to provide first class engagement documentation while at the same time reducing the amount of time it takes us to document. This has allowed us to vastly increase our operational efficiency and perform more service with fewer technicians. We pass our cost savings on to you in the form of performing more work in less time and at a lower cost.

David Daichendt
V.P. Operations
Micro Doctor, Inc.

For smaller companies and businesses who are constantly on the lookout for great free finds on the web: here are a few nifty and free online tools that might potentially help you, both in saving costs and boosting your productivity and efficiency.

It is a constant challenge for small businesses to meet ever-changing and ever-evolving IT requirements while balancing a budget and keeping costs reasonable. And with software applications being one of the major factors that contribute to IT maintenance costs, it is always welcome news to come across free tools that work well and efficiently despite the lack of a price tag.

ThinkFree Online Office One of these applications is ThinkFree Online Office, which is a cloud application that enables you to create and edit documents in common formats. It also comes with free 1GB of storage and allows you to work from anywhere, since the documents are stored online. And with its own app for Android users, ThinkFree is particularly advantageous to people who need to work on the go.

ReqMan Another free cloud-based application that can prove useful is ReqMan, an online project management tool. You can use this to manage and track your different projects using various templates the service provides. And since it's in the cloud, mobile personnel and staff who are given access to your ReqMan account can work even when they're out of the office.

Gliffy Gliffy is a free tool that you can use to create all sorts of technical illustrations – diagrams, floor plans, flowcharts, and more. The basic plan is free, but you also have the option to subscribe to their more fully featured plans for a minimal fee.

ScheduleOnce For managing schedules, calendars, and the like, ScheduleOnce allows you to keep better track of all your appointments, meetings, and deadlines through a single tool. It integrates with your calendar on Google, and then allows other people to see your open times when they can schedule a meeting with you. Think of it as a one-stop-shop for your scheduling needs.

If you want to know more about these tools and how you can best utilize them, please feel free to contact us. We’ll be happy to guide you and help you make the most out of these types of applications to improve your efficiency and bottom line.