Work Wherever You Want
used with permission from Cisco

Where will you conduct business today? Chances are that you, your colleagues, or your employees will spend time out of the office. These days, it's not necessary to spend eight hours in the office to put in a full-day's work.

How Things Will Change: Work When and Where You Want
Imagine if you had full, secure access to all your business data, applications, and resources from anywhere, on any device, and at any time. Many small and medium-sized business (SMB) owners already do. They've extended their office networks to allow themselves, their colleagues, and employees to work from anywhere they happen to be.

Cisco SMB Solutions enable easy access to your company's business data, phone system, applications, and resources via secure, wired, wireless, and fast Internet connections. Cisco offers a range of SMB solutions that help ensure:

• Employees will stay securely connected to the office and to each other. Cisco SMB Solutions enable workers to securely access the network from anyplace in the office. You can also allow employees to work from home, at a customer site, even the airport, which helps them turn potential downtime into productive time.
   

• You'll have important company information at your fingertips, wherever it's needed. Employees can be anywhere while helping a customer and still retain full access to the company network. Your mobile sales force can access confidential company information, such as customer records, while at a customer's site. They can provide immediate sales quotes, inventory updates, and customer service on the spot.
   

• Office visitors can get connected. Enable visitors such as contractors, customers, and vendors access the Internet, while you keep your network and data secure.
   

• Your workforce will make decisions faster. The ability to work from anywhere helps your people stay in touch anytime, so they can react quickly to urgent matters. Fact: 93% of all businesses have missed deadlines or experienced project delays because high-level executives were inaccessible, according to a Sage Research study.

Adding voice and conferencing capabilities to your network will bring about other important changes to your business:

• Witness an end to "phone tag." By setting up phone numbers to ring simultaneously on multiple devices (such as an office, home office, and wireless phone), you can reduce the number of opportunities lost by missed phone calls. In addition, customer calls can be routed automatically to available employees, regardless of where they might be. Employees can also check all their messages — voice, e-mail, and fax — in one simple-to-use browser-based window.

In addition, with 'presence' applications (which provide real-time status of who's available online) and instant messaging, employees can see who's online, on the phone, available or not, and the best way to reach anyone at any moment.

The result? A reduction in voicemail and unanswered phone calls enables your business to operate more efficiently and helps ensure that important calls are handled quickly.

• Serve your customers better. Improve your customer service by handling calls promptly. Because voice calls can be quickly routed over the network, customers can reach the right people at your company, wherever they may be located.
   

• Give new meaning to the word "meeting." Because everyone can stay connected, you can bring the right people together, even if they happen to be out of the office. Use conferencing solutions such as WebEx and you can add voice and video conferencing as well as application sharing into each meeting.