Data sharing is increasingly battling data-privacy concerns in an AI-dominated business society. As a result, organizations must be exceedingly cautious with any private, sensitive, or confidential data in the approaching era of data protection laws. Simultaneously, it is vital to exchange and collaborate data to stimulate innovation and discovery.

As enterprises make inroads into data-intensive AI applications, these multiple and sometimes contradictory objectives will become even more imperative. Organizations are not alone as they struggle to negotiate the twists and turns in the path to data sharing while maintaining data privacy. Many corporations and research organizations are working to assist them in addressing the difficulties at hand — and paving the way for a future in which data sharing does not conflict with data-privacy concerns.

Read more: 5 Ways Today’s Workplace Has Transitioned Digitally

Security concerns associated with Data Sharing

External sources listening on the network, unauthorized users, and internal users handing out the store endanger the integrity and privacy of data. This section describes the potentially dangerous conditions and assaults that could compromise your data.

• Accidental Exposure – Many data breaches are consequences of negligence or exposure of sensitive data rather than a deliberate attempt. Employees in an organization frequently share, grant access, lose or mishandle valuable data, either accidentally or because they are unaware of security standards.
• Data Tampering – With distributed setups comes the prospect that a malevolent third party can commit a computer crime by tampering with data as it passes between sites.
• Eavesdropping and Data Theft – On the internet and Wide Area Network (WAN) environments, public carriers and private network owners frequently route their networks via insecure landlines, vulnerable microwave and satellite connections, or several servers. These tend to expose valuable data to any external party.
• Ransomware – Ransomware is a significant threat to data. Ransomware is a virus that infects corporate devices and encrypts data, rendering it unusable without the decryption key.
• Falsifying User Identities – Criminals steal users’ credit card numbers and then use them to make purchases on their accounts. Or they steal additional personal information such as checking account numbers and driver’s license numbers and use it to open phony credit accounts in the name of someone else. 
• Accountability – If the system administrator cannot trace user activities, users cannot be held accountable for their actions.
• Complex User Management Requirements – The complexity of handling user accounts and passwords in large-scale environments leaves your system exposed to errors and attacks.

Read more: Why is It Necessary to Safeguard Data Privacy in Project Management?

Data Sharing Security – Why it matters?

According to the Ponemon Institute’s Cost of Data Breach Study, the average cost of a data breach in the United States is $8 million. Furthermore, a data breach affected a total of 25,575 user accounts, meaning that, in addition to financial losses, such occurrences lead to a loss of customer trust and a damaged reputation. 

Almost everyone in the consumer goods sector understands that poor brand experiences can swiftly undo years of brand building, a hard-earned favorable reputation, and perhaps most significantly, the trust a customer places in a brand. In today’s age of big data and digital marketing, where consumer goods businesses and merchants build detailed profiles of individual consumers based on data sources, a single data breach can significantly undermine consumer trust.

Winning consumers’ trust will be critical in the future when customer data will be a source of competitive advantage. Companies open and honest about their data usage have the opportunity to win confidence. According to Gartner, firms who successfully build digital trust will engage in 50% more ecosystems, extending revenue generation by 2023. 

Businesses must transition to a mutually advantageous data approach that gives customers greater control and gives them authorization for direct access to high-quality data in return for improved, hyper-personalized solutions with enhanced security and privacy. For this, management must develop a culture, train executives, change its organizational architecture and operating model, and evolve skills, technology, and procedures to improve how customers interact with the company and its goods at every touchpoint.

Read more: All You Need to Know About Dashboards and Data Security

How InfinCE helps to boost Customer Trust

At InfinCE, we see data privacy and security as more than just a risk management issue; but as a possible strategic asset that can be a component of brand building and company reputation. When you subscribe to InfinCE, your valuable data is kept on a virtual private server that is accessible only by your organization. You may safely access your data from anywhere from across the globe through an internet-connected device. Except for the files you download, all data is stored on InfinCE and cannot get saved to a user’s computer. As a result, you get to broaden your business with InfinCE to achieve process improvements, cost reductions, rapid business growth, and, most importantly, increased customer trust.

Some interesting features of InfinCE include: 

• Customizable Dashboards
• Collaboration Apps
• Branded Mobile App
• Business Phone System
• Domain Registration
• Productivity Tools
• Curated Application Marketplace
• Virtual Private Server
• Server and Storage Monitoring

InfinCE’s comprehensive approach, based on numerous layers of security that contribute to increased consumer trust, includes:

• Improved Data Security – Enjoy complete data privacy by utilizing virtual private servers, firewalls, and encryption/password-based access controls.
• Concierge Support – You get to use concierge support via email, phone, and live chat to assist firms in planning and deploying the best technology solutions to streamline operations.
• Device Independence – Access the business management software from anywhere using any device and resume where you left off. 
• Easy Scalability – Scale effortlessly as your business grows by expanding server capacity and storage space without incurring additional expenditures.
•  Simplified IT Management – Build from the ground up, upgrade existing programs, or interface with your existing systems using a unified platform. 

Need assistance determining how to keep your data secure regardless of what? Talk to our experts for a quick tour of the InfinCE platform.

Every business faces two types of challenges – the challenges from within and the challenges from outside. If you could make your employees satisfied, motivated, and excited to work, many internal issues would be solved even before they arise. One such internal challenge is Employee Engagement! Studies have found that more than half of the employees are uncomfortable with their workplace; hence they are not wholly focused on their work. But employing business collaboration software can resolve these issues.

An innovative all-in-one collaboration platform like InfinCE can minimize all workspace-related issues and motivate your employees to work more eagerly and enthusiastically. The most attractive side of InfinCE business collaboration software is that it lets you unify the entire workforce and brings together all of them to strive for a common goal. 

Below explains what you should consider when looking for a perfect team collaboration solution for your business.

Read more: A Guide to Improving Workplace Collaboration for the Modern Enterprise

Criteria for Choosing Collaboration Software

As there are numerous business collaboration platforms out in the market, entrepreneurs often find themselves in a dilemma when choosing one that will benefit their organization. Apparently, there are many things to be considered to ensure effective integration of the software in terms of its cost, output, and scalability. Some of the key features an ideal business collaboration solution should include are:

1. Advanced Communication Options

The primary goal of any business adopting a collaboration platform is to ensure streamlined communication among the employees. Therefore, integrating communication features like instant messaging, audio/video calling options, private and group chat options, etc., into the application makes it a perfect fit.

Different companies have different policies when it comes to communicating within their company. They may even change their communication policies from time to time. For example, some prefer emails, while some others may rely on audio/video conferences. Some may also use multiple communication channels for different employee hierarchies, such as video conferencing with top-level management and audio calling for others.

It is important to keep a tab on these aspects before you finalize a collaboration software for your company. Additionally, it is also essential to check the compatibility of the software across multiple types of devices – PCs, tablets, and smartphones to ensure it improves employee engagement.

2. File-Sharing Tools

Conventional file sharing via email has many drawbacks, and it even exposes the data in emails to cyber threats. Besides, as more and more emails with attachments pile up in the inbox, it would be pretty challenging to find the required data when you need to pull out something quickly before a meeting. However, in a modern business collaboration software like InfinCE, there are many user-friendly options for file sharing, which make it all effortless.

For instance, you can quickly share the link to a file stored in the cloud storage of InfinCE while at a conference. It allows the other team members to access the file and relevant data quickly. It is even possible to set user-level permissions on the files to limit the access to sensitive data for the top management. 

Often, it is quite a nuisance to download a file from one cloud storage space and upload it into the collaboration tool again or upload a file from the local device when you are in a virtual huddle. However, it will never be the same when you use the InfinCE collaboration platform for your business.

3. Event Management Solutions

Meetings and conferences are quite common in a modern business organization. However, keeping all the members informed about a scheduled meeting, getting their participation confirmation, and coordinating the events is no cakewalk. Business collaboration software plays another significant role here by giving you a streamlined calendar.

The integrated calendar in InfinCE allows you to keep track of all the upcoming events from a single dashboard. You can share the calendar with the team members to keep everyone in the organization informed on what is going on in the company, even if they do not need to participate in all planned events.

Read more: How InfinCE Online Collaboration Tool Helps Achieve Your Business Goals

4. Support Services

While moving to a new working ecosystem of collaboration software, we are bound to have many questions. Getting everything on track will take time and requires assistance for the same. With InfinCE collaboration software, you will not face any issues because it offers round-the-clock technical support services via three modes – email, chat, and phone. Be it a simple requirement or a complicated problem, you can reach out to the tech support team to resolve things quickly.

Another benefit of having dedicated support for your collaboration platform is that it flattens the learning curve. There could be many features that you are unfamiliar with and may not have someone to guide you through them. With 24/7 support, you can master the functions of your business collaboration tool in no time.

5. Security Features

Before you choose your collaboration tool, you need to find out the level of security it offers. Does it speak about the security policies, the precautions users need to take, and remedial actions to observe in case of adversity? 

When using a top-level collaboration tool like InfinCE, the admin is entrusted with huge responsibilities to ensure the security of the software. However, the software itself can provide high security only if a well-informed admin monitors the processes from time to time. That is where InfinCE delivers a unified dashboard to help the system and network admin track the security of the tool. At the same time, it also allows assigning roles and integrating security features like two-factor authentication and secured sign-in options to evade risks. Above all, you can count on the transparency of InfinCE for all your security concerns.

Watch: How InfinCE’s Collaboration Apps and Productivity Tools Helps Businesses Gain a Competetive Edge!

How Can You Benefit from Using Business Collaboration Software

When great minds work together for a common goal, the result will be amazing. Business collaboration software creates a space for improved cooperation and lays the stepping stone for achieving impeccable results. Moreover, with effective collaboration among the workforce, the time required for realizing the goals becomes shorter. It eventually translates into business growth and the overall profitability of the company.

Apart from breaking the barriers to business growth due to lack of communication among the workforce, a reliable all-in-one collaboration platform also paves the way for better scalability. When you can monitor all the resources, experiences, finances, and infrastructure from a unified dashboard, it is easy to proactively tackle any challenges and make effective problem-solving decisions. What’s more, when you ensure optimal employee engagement and productivity, you can explore modern markets, build new relationships, and invest in diverse market structures.

Collaboration is an integral part of every business’ success. The above-discussed points highlight how business collaboration software promotes employee cooperation and satisfaction in today’s new world order. Superior innovation, productivity, and efficiency are guaranteed when you integrate a modern collaboration tool like InfinCE and utilize its features to the fullest. Connect with our experts today to know more about InfinCE, or just Sign Up 30 days free trial to explore!

How Online Collaboration Tool Like InfinCE Help Define Your Business Success

Online collaboration tools are a vital business asset today. The sudden shift to remote work has mandated the use of virtual collaboration tools across several business sectors. From defining a successful business strategy to helping employees connect with teams, online collaboration tools play an integral role in solving business challenges. The core benefit of using virtual collaboration tools is facilitating decision-making, enhancing productivity, and efficiently realizing the business goals.

Why do you need an online collaboration tool? What makes InfinCE the best fit?

To make the most of your business collaboration tool, you should first know why you need it and what pain points it can help you mitigate. Like other business aspects, proper planning should come before selecting the best online collaboration tool. Adequate planning coupled with the right tool selection can help you attain effective online collaboration. 

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE

Following are the benefits offered by InfinCE online collaboration tool.

1. Saves time and costs for businesses

One of the key perks of deploying the InfinCE online collaboration tool is that it helps you save time. When your teams collaborate and work without lags or disruptions, they can achieve the targets much quicker. It translates to cost savings in the long run and ensures optimal employee performance.

2. Strengthens employee relationships 

The lack of face-to-face meetings in today’s remote work culture can take a toll on the relationships of your teams. InfinCE virtual collaboration tool helps you schedule audio or video meetings and one-to-one calls. The platform helps ensure robust team communication and work collaboration and boosts employee engagement and morale, no matter where your employees are.

3. Simplifies project management 

InfinCE online collaboration tool is designed to simplify your project management. With all the essential productivity apps in hand, you can keep track of your team’s performance, monitor the progress of different projects, improve communication, and ensure that you get the most out of everyone involved. InfinCE also offers a unified, custom dashboard to help you access every data required to manage your teams in a single place.

4. Streamlines information exchange 

InfinCE virtual collaboration software also makes data and file sharing more manageable, which means that your employees can access the information as and when needed to perform their tasks. Moreover, it helps organize your task management so that you do not have to run into any trouble due to missed deadlines. 

Read more: 7 Ways to Improve Team Collaboration in 2021 

5. Integrates with a multitude of third-party applications

You can integrate your preferred productivity apps with InfinCE to make the most of the collaboration software. By introducing social interactions into the existing business systems, you can see significant improvements in your teams’ overall efficiency and productivity. At the same time, InfinCE helps overcome the challenges of aggregating valuable files and folders to make business management easier for the leaders.

6. Prevents juggling multiple business apps

You can save time and resources by adopting a unified virtual collaboration platform like InfinCE. For instance, having all the required functions in a single place, such as data sharing, information broadcasting, project tracking, attendance monitoring, and more, you do not have to switch apps to manage your business. At the same time, you will not have to subscribe to multiple applications when you employ an all-in-one collaboration platform like InfinCE, which makes forecasting the monthly expenses much more effortless.

7. Helps stay on top with enterprise cloud innovations

InfinCE online collaboration tool allows you to interact with your colleagues, partners, customers, and stakeholders from anywhere in the world. 

Being an enterprise cloud application, InfinCE allows you to share the required information with your team and helps them work toward reaching a common goal. This way, you can streamline the workflow of your remote employees, ensure improved efficiency, drive superior productivity, and facilitate innovation.

With regular feature updates and modern technology provisions, InfinCE is helping businesses define their path to success through effective enterprise collaboration. It allows you to work on ideas that will come to fruition, avoid potential issues as they crop up, and create a stress-free and more enjoyable work environment. 

Case Study: How Fingent Achieved Breakthroughs in Collaboration with InfinCE 

3 tips for deploying your online collaboration tool successfully

Implementing a virtual collaboration tool like InfinCE can be done without disrupting your existing business processes. Yet again, it is always better to keep an adjustment period in mind when you deploy the concept of online collaboration into your business, as some of your employees may be new to it. Here are some tips to help you get started with InfinCE with minimal disruption to your current business systems.

1. Transition slowly

While starting right away and transitioning every business process into the new system is essential, you need to plan it well and move gradually. For example, shifting to an entirely different work environment can be challenging for team members who have never used an online collaboration tool earlier. A phase-by-phase transition will help ensure that everyone is on the same page and avoid any productivity loss.

2. Work with an expert

Although you may feel like using an online collaboration platform does not take much learning, and you can master it within a few days, it is always better to work with an expert initially to fully understand the scope of the platform. With InfinCE, you get 24/7 support from a well-informed team of experts who can guide you through making the most of the collaboration platform. This way, you can introduce the new concept more adeptly to your team and avoid potential issues.

3. Evaluate and select the right software

There is no arguing that you can easily get confused with the availability of so many different options out there. Nonetheless, as mentioned, you need to assess your requirements well to make the right choice. Consider the features offered by the online collaboration software, how you plan to use those features, and how these features will ease the challenges your business is facing. Meanwhile, also determine whether the cost of the platform is reasonable in terms of the solutions it provides.

Read more: 5 Points To Consider While Choosing Your Enterprise Collaboration Software 

While online collaboration can seem like a complex concept at first, the availability of powerful tools like InfinCE has simplified it to a great extent. 

Boost your virtual collaboration with InfinCE

If your business supports a socially collaborative work culture, you can make it even more engaging by employing the InfinCE all-in-one collaboration platform. With features like real-time messaging, voice and video calling, activity streams, and collaboration workspaces, InfinCE can enhance the efficiency of your business systems already in place. Get in touch with us to learn more about InfinCE. 

How to Improve Your Intranet for Better Employee Experience

Technology advancements and modern communication tools have changed the entire landscape of employee engagement and workplace collaboration. While intranets have been at the center of teamwork and business communication for years, they are seemingly competing with more contemporary technologies these days to offer the same level of seamless experience they did a couple of years ago. Besides, as today’s digital-first age heavily relies on a remote work culture with distributed teams, it is crucial to reconceptualize the intranet infrastructure and make it more efficient to stay competitive and relevant in the industry.

Below are ten ways to reimagine your intranet and ensure better employee engagement and collaboration in your organization.

Read more: 5 Tips to Analyze and Select the Right Business Intranet Solution

1. Focus on your usability

You need to re-design your intranet with modern features by focusing on its usability. Understand how your teams use the company intranet to collaborate with colleagues, find new information, and perform other tasks like filling the paperwork. Your goal should be to facilitate all these activities while ensuring that your intranet is easy to use and integrates with the latest tools that your employees need. Likewise, it should also have an inherent search function to let everyone find the information they are looking for quickly.

2. Keep it aligned with your business objectives

Your company intranet should not just cater to the organization’s communication needs but also help to realize broader business goals. You need to identify how your intranet can solve potential company challenges and how it can contribute to your enterprise success. Therefore, it’s crucial to identify the key performance indicators that will allow you to track your business performance and progress. It also helps create actionable insights for redefining your communications strategy.

Case Study: How Fingent Achieved Breakthroughs in Collaboration with InfinCE Digital Workplace

3. Bring mobile devices into play

Remote workers can collaborate in a much better way when you integrate mobile devices into the intranet infrastructure. With mobile-ready intranet solutions, your employees can connect to the central system to access the data and information needed to perform their duties from anywhere they want. This multichannel approach also boosts the reach of your company communications and allows you to engage your employees on multiple touch points such as instant messaging, news feed snippets, video calling, etc.

Read more: How SMBs Can Overcome Challenges to Build a Mobile-First Workplace

4. Promote two-way communication

Traditionally, intranets were used to receive messages but not as a tool that facilitated two-way communication. As modern all-in-one collaboration platforms go beyond being an information and announcements hub, you need to upgrade your intranet system to support bidirectional conversations to make the most of it. It can serve as a secure and seamless channel for your employees to interact and even run brainstorming sessions on new projects. Having comprehensive intranet profiles can work like social media networks.

5. Build a strong company culture

One of the fundamental elements of digital transformation is transforming the traditional workplace culture into a more collaborative, digitally-powered environment. It means you need to reimagine your intranet to meet those goals and build strong company culture by conveying your mission and business values to the entire team. When coupled with features like performance objectives, employee recognition, and a thorough onboarding process, your intranet can lead to defining thriving company culture.

6. Think beyond decentralized communication

Decentralizing business communications is an integral part of modern-day internal collaboration platforms. It takes the unconventional route of allowing all employees to be responsible for their intranet profiles instead of the core team managing everything. Decentralizing communication will instill a sense of freedom and independence within your company while allowing coworkers to interact with each other in their departments more actively. Eventually, this will lead to stronger bonds between employees, which is a crucial factor that drives improved efficiency and business success.

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce

7. Manage the content wisely

Creating highly-engaging content has always helped businesses to capture the attention of their employees and ensure better engagement. No matter how the times have changed, content that provides value to your workforce will still be a decisive element in determining your company’s success. However, the way people consume content has significantly changed, so you need to consider how your employees interact with the content you deliver through the intranet to create a robust strategy.

8. Improve the search capabilities

As mentioned previously, improving the search function to let users find the relevant content without any hassle is an integral part of making your intranet more user-friendly. Therefore, you need to revamp your intranet’s traditional and outdated structure and make it simpler for your employees to search for content no matter which device they are using. This will facilitate seamless communication across the organization and make workflow management more efficient.

9. Publish personalized and targeted content

Targeted and personalized content makes it relatively easy to keep employees engaged and motivated. Several studies have found that targeted channels lead to nearly twice the click-through rates. So if you see that your employees use the company app more often than opening their emails, then directing your focus to in-app messaging can be a more efficient way to meet your needs. You can do this by segregating your workforce into different types of audience segments and then creating custom content for each segment.

Download White Paper: Reinventing the Corporate Intranet with Employee Experience at the Center

10. Add a workforce collaboration platform

The best way to optimize your intranet and make the most of the internal communications is by bringing a workplace collaboration tool like InfinCE to the mix. Work collaboration tools like InfinCE will boost your intranet system’s capabilities and functions to more actively deliver company news and information. At the same time, it will ensure that your employees get all the tools they need to interact and collaborate on a project effectively. Moreover, an all-in-one workplace collaboration platform can also give you a unified dashboard to monitor and manage everything.

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business

The above-stated are some of the fundamental ways to transform your intranet into a more effective and collaborative platform that keeps your workforce engaged and motivated to deliver their best performance. As modern-day challenges need adopting innovative and forward-thinking approaches, it is high time to reimagine your intranet with the right upgrades and ensure optimal employee engagement for superior operational efficiency.

Whether your team is working together or remotely, InfinCE makes sure that your people can effectively communicate, connect, and engage seamlessly! InfinCE’s intranet, powered by shareable dashboards, blogs, wiki, communication apps, and productivity tools, can transform employee communications across your organization. Contact us to learn more. 

Is your KPI Tracking Software pursuing these 5 metrics?

Achieving sustainable growth is vital for businesses of all sizes today. With pandemics like COVID-19 showing how unexpected events have the potential of wrecking global economies in the blink of an eye, it is important for today’s businesses to have a well established Key Performance Index driven metrics to track for their business growth. By following these metrics closely, a business can be better prepared to combat threats from competition, changing market trends, disruptive market forces like pandemics, and ensure that there is steady cash flow even in the most challenging of times. These KPI metrics should be on the organization’s business dashboard software which will be reviewed and closely monitored by the leadership and will form the foundation of all strategic initiatives and decisions taken by the board or top management. So now the question is what are those KPI metrics that need to be tracked on an organization’s business dashboard software to ensure sustainable growth? 

Here are our top 5 picks:

1. Cash To Revenue Position

In the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic, China was one of the worst affected economies. Studies showed that nearly 85% of small and medium enterprises (SME) were projected to run out of cash in a timeframe as low as 2 months due to severe lockdowns leading to restrictive economic activity. 

Cash to revenue position is an indication of how well endowed is an enterprise to deal with emergencies and how much liquid cash they have at their disposal to invest in measures to counter low revenue scenarios such as pandemics or weak consumer spending. When the position is better, business owners or management has breathing space to make amendments in their operational style when revenue channels are disrupted and without having to take drastic measures such as cutting jobs or delaying bills. This is definitely an important metric that needs to be on every business KPI dashboard software and monitored regularly.

Read more: Creating Organizational, Department, Team and Personal Dashboards using InfinCE

2. Customer Acquisition Costs

For any business to survive, there is a need for customers to spend money on their products or services. In the business world, it has been proven through studies that acquiring a new customer would incur more than 5 times the cost it takes to retain an existing one. As such, customer acquisition costs have the potential to consume the budgets of several departments like sales, marketing, and IT. So, leaders need to keep a tab on spending in this section and this is precisely the reason why customer acquisition costs are an important metric that needs to be tracked via an organization’s KPI dashboard software.

3. Outbound Marketing Performance

Marketing is the engine that fuels sales. The better a business is able to market its offerings to the right audience, the greater will be the business returns in terms of sales revenue. However, marketing needs to be a highly disciplined and well-tracked activity, especially for small and medium businesses. 

Conversion rates from marketing activities are important in ensuring that a business always has a healthy leads pipeline that the sales department can focus on and convert into deals in due course of time. Using intelligent marketing analytics and automation platforms, businesses need to track their ROI on every single dollar spend and correlate to the leads or business opportunity, or social influence that a marketing campaign was able to generate. 

While sales are in itself a large activity that can be tracked through a separate KPI in an organization’s KPI tracking software, it can also be clubbed with the marketing KPI in small businesses. The reason is that in smaller organizations, it is quite common for marketing and sales to be functioning as a single entity sharing a lot of human and technology resources and well synchronized towards a common goal.

Read more: Focus on these 5 KPIs to improve small business growth

4. Operational Efficiency

Improving the quality of labor is vital for businesses to survive in the long run. Studies show that 52% of SMB owners find it hard to hire a quality workforce. So, the next biggest challenge here is to maintain productivity. Every business organization will have its unique list of business processes, policies, and frameworks on which they operate daily. As the competition tightens, it is important to work as a lean business organization with more agility to ensure that customer needs are understood and fulfilled at the earliest. For this to happen, there is a need for seamless operational efficiency. 

Read more: 5 Key Features Every Project Management Dashboard Should Offer 

It is important to keep track of the time it takes for a sales process to be completed, the number of sub-processes involved, the amount of productive time an employee or team spends in a project or sales transaction, and other similar elements that need to be measured. Once these are known, it becomes easier for decision-makers to re-engineer processes and work frameworks regularly to cope with changing trends in the market and help employees adopt new additions to the business easily, such as new software or new machinery in a manufacturing unit. 

The training process can be tweaked in line with new learning norms prevalent in the market and made easy and highly accessible for employees so that they can speed up the learning activity. Both the employee performance as well as the operational efficiency of the business thus need to be tracked efficiently in an organizational KPI tracking software.

5. Employee Engagement

Employees are just as important as customers to a business. Ensuring that they are well-taken care of is a key milestone that every business must strive to achieve. Studies show that 71% of executives believe that employee engagement is key to ensuring successful business growth. While measuring it as a KPI, employee engagement will include a vast majority of key indicators of employee wellbeing. Some examples of items to be evaluated for this KPI include employee turnover, attrition rates, revenue per employee, hiring budgets, etc. Insights from this metric are important to plan the future expansion of the business as you always need employees to drive your business forward in all circumstances.

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business  

The above 5 metrics give a clear picture of whether your business is progressing in the right direction. Having a regular watch on these will ensure that you are prepared well for any emergencies or disruptive situations that may occur in the future like the COVID-19 pandemic. To drive maximum results, it is important to have a digital backbone that will enable all units in your business to seamlessly measure KPIs and perform according to expectations in their respective tasks. This is what InfinCE can help you achieve with its range of business applications available on a secure cloud platform. Get in touch with us for more details.

The Role of Business Communication Tools in the Growth of a Business

Effective communication is the backbone of every successful business. This is even more applicable for modern businesses because of the massive shifts in the workplace culture of late. Technology advancements and the impact of COVID-19 have made robust business communication tools more than a necessity in every industry today. Fortunately, there are many impressive business communication apps, which make it easier for leaders and managers to collaborate with their teams, connect the missing dots, and drive improved performance and productivity.

Why Business Communication Tools are Inevitable in Today’s Workplace

It has become a norm for employees to use business communication tools for efficient collaboration. A recent Facebook Messaging Survey found that more than 63% of people across generations prefer messaging apps for communication instead of emails or calls. The impact can be seen in the business world as well with around 60% of businesses of all sizes using collaborative chat apps today. That is because business communication apps perfectly suit the evolving workplace culture while opening up ways to ensure improved employee productivity.

How Business Communication Apps Contribute to Business Growth

Business communication tools offer a flexible platform to furnish the varying demands of interaction within the company. Below are some of the fundamental advantages of using business communication tools that help in business growth.

1. Unmatched Adaptability

The nature of the modern workplace is changing rapidly and businesses across industries are promoting remote work. With a reliable communication app, leaders can collaborate with remote workers as needed, while allowing them to work as per their schedules. As more than 70% of millennial employees prefer working in a flexible environment, it is high time for businesses to adapt to the change and ensure proper communication channels to boost productivity.

Read more: 5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times 

2. Easy Data Sharing

Modern communication tools come with simple features to share all the data and information needed for any task. Team leaders and employees can share files, upload links, or even directly stream content to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Business communication apps like InfinCE allow you to save files and data on the integrated cloud system. This makes collaborating on a project further easier, as anyone can access the required files later.

3. Effortless Task Management

Leaders can have a very difficult time managing a project if the team communicated through multiple channels. A business communication tool is much more than an everyday messaging app. It brings everything in one place so that managers and leaders can have a quick overview of the processes and stay updated with the progress of the project. It also makes planning tasks, assigning duties, setting deadlines, etc., simpler while improving accountability amongst the team members.

4. Real-Time Communication

Team collaboration apps keep employees posted on what is going on and make it easier to focus on their job roles. Messages can be sent to individual employees or in a group to make sure that everyone stays on track and performs their duties on time. Business messaging apps like InfinCE come with video conferencing capabilities to make meetings more interactive and engaging.

Read more: 5 Workplace Innovations You Can Welcome with Video Conferencing 

5. Less Unproductive Meetings

Physical team meetings can waste a lot of productive time. As per the Harvard Business Review, around 65% of employees believe that “meetings keep them from completing their own work, while 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.” This serious problem needs to be fixed as quickly as possible to ensure better employee efficiency. As team collaboration apps allow you to access relevant information anytime and from anywhere, they help avoid the need for any physical meetings.

6. Improved Employee Engagement

Business communication apps are much different from mundane emails. They can act as a platform to share inspiring stories, exciting news, motivational messages, and have some fun too. Team messaging apps are not necessarily limited to sharing business-related data; many of them also come with emojis and stickers to add a personal touch to the messages and make it a bit lighthearted.

Read more: 5 Ways To Improve Business Growth Through Employee Engagement

7. Integrated Modern Technologies

An enterprise collaboration app can also be customized to accommodate various modern technologies, such as Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Natural Language Processing, Predictive Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. These technologies can help streamline business communication by sorting information, analyzing data, generating reports, creating policies, and much more. This will, in turn, help to ease the stress of performing routine tasks from the employees and they can focus on other productive duties.

8. Performance Tracking

A business communication app can also allow leaders to track the performance of their teams effectively. Team collaboration tools allow managers to create jobs and determine goals before handing over those to the team members. They can then track the progress toward the specific goals and see how each employee is collaborating to achieve them. This brings more transparency to the team, boosts accountability among the employees, and motivates them to perform better.

Read more: 11 Online Collaboration Tools That Facilitate Remote Work In 2020

9. Mobile Apps

Everyone prefers to use mobile apps these days to read emails, track work, share information, and more. Forrester reports that around “66% of employees now use two or more devices every day.” With an integrated mobile app for business communication, employees will not have to manage multiple channels to communicate with each other. Instead, it will make it easier to access all the data and information across devices.

10. Improved Productivity

The most obvious benefit of workplace apps is that it improves employee productivity. As business communication tools make it easier to set goals, assign jobs, track progress, generate reports, and interact with the team members in real-time, they help boost employee morale and efficiency. Having a single channel for all business communication also avoids the need for multitasking, which further helps to improve time management.

There are countless ways for team members to interact with each other, but business communication apps give a more dedicated platform for building a productive work environment. While it cannot be predicted how the future will shape workplace culture, it can be said that advanced and feature-rich business communication tools will certainly be integral in the coming days.InfinCE brings you a pool of effective collaboration software to help you connect with your teams faster and work together better, for greater business achievements. Get in touch with us to learn more.

10 Leading Apps for Secure Enterprise File Transfer in 2020

From being one of the world’s most severe pandemics, the COVID-19 disease has devastated economies of almost all countries worldwide by forcing them to go into lockdown situations that were unprecedented in the past. There are several businesses that have been forced to operate with their staff working remotely and their business moving to predominantly digital channels. From retail to finance, there was a rapid shift in consumer appetite from an in-person store or branch visit to availing of goods and services from the comfort of their homes. To sustain operations of their digital customer channels, businesses had to ensure that their workforce too was able to work seamlessly and productively from their homes. However, conducting daily business operations from home rather than an office environment had its fair share of challenges. One of the most dominant challenges that existed was facilitating seamless and secure file sharing between employees. 

Confidential files that involved sensitive information are often shared between employees of the same department or between departments for various operational reasons. While at the office, the securely monitored local network serves as the best medium to share files irrespective of a file’s size. Being locally hosted and monitored, there wasn’t any threat from erroneous or malicious access being made of the files. For employees who now have to work from home, businesses have to rely on internet-based file-sharing platforms to enable continuity of their operations through successful employee collaboration.

Read more: 6 Ways to Build a Secure File Sharing Practice Within Your Organization

Keeping this need of facilitating secure file transfer between employees, let us explore the top 10 apps that help businesses achieve this feat seamlessly:

1. InfinCE

If you are looking for a one-stop-shop to enable your business to transition into a digital-friendly one, then InfinCE is the solution you have been searching for. InfinCE offers unparalleled cloud file storage and sharing options as well as becomes a comprehensive enterprise digital platform for collaboration, customer relationship management, HRM, and all core operational areas. InfinCE offers a branded cloud platform and a custom website builder with personalized options to match your brand’s identity. 

Read more: 5 Features of InfinCE that will Transform The Way You Work 

2. Dropbox Business

One of the early birds in the cloud storage market, Dropbox made its name from being the preferred destination for storing and sharing files online. For businesses, they have a dedicated enterprise version offering seamless file sharing, collaboration, and synchronization while ensuring secure information exchange between stakeholders.

3. G Suite Google Drive

Google is the undisputed leader for personal communication and collaboration with its range of services like Gmail and G Suite web productivity and storage apps. For businesses, Google offers an even more superlative file sharing and collaborative experience with its dedicated business focused G Suite Google Drive services. With highly affordable subscription plans and splendid support, it offers a great value proposition for businesses of all sizes.

4. One Drive for Business

Microsoft did not want to be left out of the enterprise file sharing market when its key rivals were all offering highly competitive products to entice customers. The One Drive for Business platform offers a highly scalable cloud-based storage and file sharing service that allows employees to securely share large files with their peers effortlessly and also get access to Microsoft’s leading enterprise collaboration tools like MS Word, PowerPoint, etc. as integrated subscription options for very attractive prices.

Read more: Top 10 Alternatives to Microsoft Teams that Aid Remote Work in 2020 

5. Citrix ShareFile

Citrix is a darling of the enterprise world where thousands of companies rely on their virtualization and secure remote access platforms to conduct business. The file-sharing app offered by Citrix offers an equally efficient job of helping businesses facilitate better and more secure file sharing to sustain their operations.

6. Firefox Send

The world’s most popular open-source web browser offers a free and secure file sharing feature via the Firefox Send option. It allows users to share files securely by simply dragging and dropping the file into the browser and share access links to relevant stakeholders. You even have options to set expiry for the files after a certain number of downloads or even set password protection for added security.

7. WeTransfer

WeTransfer provides business users with a simple drag and drop interface to host files on the cloud and share it with privileged access to any stakeholder. With free and paid versions available, the platform offers one of the quickest free sharing experiences for any collaborative file.

8. FileCloud

If you need a file-sharing platform that can be customized with your own intuitive corporate branding guidelines, then FileCloud is the perfect option for your business. It offers a highly personalized dashboard that can be modified according to your branding guidelines to give a unique user experience for all your employees while they use it to share files seamlessly with peers.

9. Box Business

Box is also one of the earliest cloud storage companies that revolutionized online file sharing. With seamless integration capabilities for G-suite, Office 365, and other popular collaboration platforms, Box makes for an attractive enterprise data-sharing platform with secure credentials thanks to its focus on encryption using data protection policies of high standards.

10. SendAnywhere

This is one platform that sticks to its name more rigorously to carry out its operations. It simply lets users send files from one location to anywhere using its secure data transfer channel. A paid subscription offers higher data caps and more control over transfer permissions making it a worthy contender for today’s business users.

Read more: 11 Online Collaboration Tools That Facilitate Remote Work In 2020

We hope you get to make an informed choice for your business’s digital future from our recommendations above and enable your staff to seamlessly share information and collaborate on work. Besides secure file transfer, InfinCE offers a basket of features that enable hassle-free and seamless remote work for enterprises of all sizes. 

Get in touch with us to know more about how InfinCE can be the best remote cloud platform for your business. 

Why is a custom web domain important for your business branding needs?

Having a website is considered a standard pre-requisite for today’s businesses as it is likely the first place where people will enquire about the business and its offerings. While creating and hosting a website is no big deal today with the tons of ready to deploy template website builder services available, there is one element that you must focus from a branding perspective for an enterprise website. It is none other than a custom domain name. For example, if your business name is “John’s Giant Ice Cream”, then a website with URL as www.johnsgianticecream.com will be more appealing from a branding perspective than having one such as www.johnsgianticecream.wordpress or www.johnsgianticecream.blogger.com. The same logic applies to your enterprise email id as well. If you have an official email account that reflects your business name as the email domain rather than Gmail or Hotmail, it is better from a branding perspective.

Let us examine 5 benefits of branding that your business will experience if you have a custom website domain and email:

1. Brand Recognition

Having a co-branded domain such as wordpress.com/mybusiness would be harder to remember for customers than one such as www.mybusiness.com. This would make it easier for customers to pass information about your business to their friends verbally or via telephone calls. The element of simplicity in having a custom website and email URL will ensure that your customers, both existing and prospective, can reach out to you at the earliest, in case there is a need for them to avail of your services or buy your products.

2. Risk-Free Personalized Identity

From a business point of view, having a unique website and email domain would ensure that they have a unique existence. When you have a 3^rd party sponsored co-domain as your business’s web address, then there are chances that you may have to change them in the future depending on policies made by the service provider. The service provider could cease to exist due to other issues and your domain goes down with them thereby impacting the large presence you would have built over the years with that website. Considering the risks involved in such a scenario, a custom domain for your website and email makes sense for a secure and seamless future for your business with a personalized identity.

3. Search Engine Friendly

Building a simple website for your business’s online reach is not a very tough thing to do. But making it visible in search engine results with a high ranking takes a lot of effort. By having a custom website URL, it helps your website to rank better in search engine ranking algorithms that focus on uniqueness more than generic names and 3^rd party hosting service providers who append their names to your domain for free hosting. As such a unique URL is more likely to be shared on social media, they get better ranking credits on that front as well.

Read more: 5 Ways Virtual Private Server Make a Difference to Your Business’s Digital Future

4. Subdomain Flexibility

Very often you might face the need to create subdomains within your website to have separate showcase pages for a particular service or marquee product. When you do not have a custom domain for your business, the concept of subdomains becomes even more complex. In most 3^rd party hosted domain services, you do not even get that option to include further subdomain on your website. This further reduces your organic SEO efforts and also makes it harder for customers to trust your unique offerings and learn more information about them from the subpage.

Read more: 5 Tips to Select the Ideal Web Hosting Partner

5. Email Credibility

One of the biggest advantages of having a custom business domain for your web landscape is the ability to have a unique email domain. When contacting customers or prospects, having a genuine business name domain as the extension of your email address will add more credibility. From a receiver’s point of view, they will feel more genuineness in your business for the effort you took in creating a unique domain name for your website and email communication address rather than opting for a free service like Gmail or Hotmail. A professional email address is also a unique credential for your business to avail of multiple digital services available online today that helps in boosting your internet-based business services. Examples include payment gateways, information forms, cloud storage options, and much more.

Read more: How to choose an email service provider for your small business?

Set up your professional custom domain and private email with InfinCE

If you are a business owner wanting to have a unique identity on the internet with a website and email, then you should definitely explore the option of a custom domain rather than opting for free hosting service providers. 

The several benefits in branding and customer experience you stand to enjoy as outlined above will be instrumental in growing your business in the coming years as more customers rely on internet-powered digital channels for their daily needs. 

Having a powerful digital ecosystem with credible domain and secure hosting infrastructure is the need of the hour especially for small and medium businesses. This is where InfinCE can be the ideal companion for your success. Get in touch with us to see how you can build and deploy a comprehensive web-based business online with custom URL and professional email service with InfinCE in a matter of days.

How InfinCE Transforms the Way Your Workforce Operates Today

As vaccine trials show promising results, the world is in high hopes of recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic slowly. But the scale at which vaccination needs to happen, conquering challenges in production, logistics, demographic, political, and societal scenarios, is huge and hence it may take time for the total eradication of the virus. This means, the new norm of working for most companies wherein a good majority of their employees work from home, is likely to continue for the long term. However, 2020 witnessed the massive change of modern workplace software being increasingly brought to the traditional workforce wherein it only took a matter of days for millions of employees to work at the same pace from their home as they would from their office.

One of the most celebrated enterprise collaboration and digital platform for small and medium businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic was InfinCE. Some of the most demanding businesses managed to successfully keep their staff engaged and productive through seamless collaboration courtesy of InfinCE. 

Read More: Top 10 Alternatives to Microsoft Teams that Aid Remote Work in 2020

Today, let us take a look at the 5 key features of InfinCE that make it an undisputed leader in enabling better employee collaboration and transforming the way employees work remotely.

1. Easy Information Access

When employees work remotely, the biggest hurdle they face is getting information about their job activities at the earliest. With InfinCE’s cloud-based platform, companies can create a centralized virtual repository of all company information that employees can access based on their job roles. InfinCE allows privileged access control options to ensure that confidential or sensitive files and data are made available only to the right stakeholders and with proper logging of access to ensure transparency. 

The best part is that employees can access this information on the go right from the comfort of their smartphones thereby providing more flexibility. This allows them to plan better responses for customer-facing job objectives.

2. Improved Collaboration

With InfinCE, enterprises can create virtual workspace platforms wherein teams working on a project can converge and collaborate digitally. Be it brainstorming for solutions and ideas, daily standup meetings, project progress meetings, the platform allows all team members to digitally meet in one place.  You can securely share files, work together on documents, communicate via instant messaging, manage dependencies in work together, and create custom dashboards- both at the individual level or at the team/ department level to visually track and analyze what’s happening in your business. 

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business

Collaboration is propelled to the next level as employees can carry out almost all sorts of work activities together just as how they would do so when they were at the office. This is facilitated irrespective of where your employee may be based out, anywhere on the globe.

3. Budget Friendliness

When a pandemic rips through economies worldwide, it is important for companies to preserve operational cash flow to the maximum possible limit. For this to happen, they need to enable a digital-first environment for employees that don’t burn a hole in their pockets. InfinCE has always been built for the cloud-centric enterprise of tomorrow. With a range of subscription pricing plans, the digital enterprise platform offers more value for every single dollar spent as a subscription charge. 

InfinCE offers small and medium businesses the flexibility to save on costs since they only pay for the features and scale they consume from the platform. This helps them significantly boost their operating margins as expenditure comes down drastically. The additional savings can go a long way in helping businesses preserve cash and sustain profitable operations in challenging times.

4. Secure Digital Infrastructure

Today’s businesses deal with a large volume of sensitive customer data that needs to be accessed and shared between multiple employees across different departments. When your entire work environment turns into a remote one due to a global pandemic, the concerns regarding data security heightens to new levels. This is where InfinCE assures peace of mind with its state-of-the-art security credentials. The platform offers you the choice to run your digital enterprise infrastructure on a secure private cloud location which can be monitored and managed effectively by your technology team without worrying about security threats.

From building your website to offering a secure intranet, InfinCE offers all the IT set up needed to run your business under one roof! InfinCE provides you a dedicated and secured cloud-hosted IT infrastructure comprising a private email server, dedicated virtual servers, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), intranet for internal communication, and custom website builder. 

Read more: How InfinCE enables you to quickly transit to remote working

5. Long List of Applications

Over the years, InfinCE has grown a large community of applications under its ecosystem that enables businesses to streamline productivity and improve engagement levels of their employees. Additionally, the platform also allows small and medium businesses to experience the digital transformation of their key growth activities like human resource management, marketing, and sales by introducing applications for CRM, marketing automation, HCM, and much more. 

The list of supporting apps for the InfinCE ecosystem has been steadily growing which makes it a complete digital package for today’s businesses. InfinCE helps you build a branded cloud platform with customization options to match your brand identity.

As your business operations are increasingly being disrupted, it is becoming clear that there is a need to rapidly transition your operational model to accommodate a highly digital-friendly workforce that can work from anywhere. InfinCE takes you closer to this goal by creating the most secure and cost-efficient yet feature-rich experience for your business’s digital infrastructure. Get in touch with us to know more.

Can centralized dashboards improve workplace productivity?

Dashboards are often an intrinsic part of today’s business world. From helping executives and leaders make decisions to enable seamless forecasting of business opportunities, they play a key role in the corporate world. But this curated information repository is not just meant for reporting and senior leadership alone. In today’s highly decentralized workforce environment that is increasingly being pushed to a remote future with a pandemic like COVID-19, employee dashboards are becoming a vital part of the workforce as well.

There is a huge demand for easy access to information within an organization at all levels. Several teams require access to different kinds of information like for example, project management dashboards where different project activities and tasks are managed, CRM dashboards that give a holistic view of marketing and sales activities, attendance and leave management dashboards for depicting employee activities and much more. 

Read more: 5 Key Features Every Project Management Dashboard Should Offer

With remote working becoming a norm, here are 5 ways in which having a centralized dashboard can improve your businesses efficiency and work productivity:

1. Overview in a snapshot

A workforce dashboard for any department offers a comprehensive yet highly precise snapshot of the team’s or company’s performance. From getting inputs about a project task to viewing the progress of service requests, the employee dashboard enables the workforce to transparently seek information on demand. 

By customizing the nature of information available across departments, job levels, and roles, it is possible for organizations to roll out tailored initiatives for each individual and enable them to track their progress at each stage. It also gives a single source of truth for all employees to be able to stay updated with what’s happening across their operational units, departments, or job roles within the company.

Read more: Creating Organizational, Department, Team and Personal Dashboards using InfinCE

2. Setting up organization goals

With a customizable company dashboard, it is easy for the senior leadership to create a new objective, break it down into achievable components and keep track of each of these components which have been assigned to different teams. This whole activity can be easily represented as a goal on the company dashboard with defined metrics. It can be seen by all employees who can also track its growth, view achievement milestones, calculate their own effort needed to help in progressing each component, and much more. 

In short, a dashboard helps companies take up smaller initiatives that add value to long term company goals and keep track of how every individual effort within the company contributes to this value.

Read more: Focus on these 5 KPIs to improve small business growth

3. Learning and Development

A centralized employee dashboard can be the sole information source employees can access to advance their career aspirations within the company. Learning paths can be defined with help from senior leaders, progress in learning initiatives can be tracked and achievements can be recognized and rewarded across job levels with the help of a transparent dashboard. 

It is also possible to set up company-wide learning initiatives with specific instructions, standardized learning curriculum, and certifications and this information can be used for future performance and other metric calculations as well.

4. Improve Visibility

When the management evaluates performance, productivity, and other vital business parameters, it is often presumed that employees are left in the dark about the progress made. With centralized dashboards, it is now possible for senior leaders to easily communicate the information down to the lowest levels of job roles within the organization. 

Employees can see visual reports of the company’s growth, performance assessment steps, and percentages of teams, intuitive breakdown of career goals and how they are aligned to performance benchmarks, and so on. This helps to create transparency within the workplace. Employees feel that they are treated and rewarded fairly when it comes to matters such as performance ratings, payment revisions, etc. It also sets a clear path for employees to identify their weaknesses and improve on areas that need focus.

Read more: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

5. Staying Connected

An employee dashboard is not just about reports and charts that give a view of the daily operations of the company. It is more like an intranet portal where employees get together virtually for sharing information, staying connected with their friends at the workplace, exchange conversations, and much more. Organizations on the other hand have a medium to channel content directly to employees transparently. 

Important announcements, events, virtual meet-ups, etc. can all be facilitated smoothly through an interactive and intuitive employee dashboard. When most of your employees work from their homes in times such as the COVID-19 pandemic era, this will greatly enhance their work morale and also create a relaxed working environment that does not allow physical meetups for a long tenure.

A centralized dashboard creates a better working experience for all employees and is vital in creating a highly engaged and motivated workforce. When most employees work remotely, this is a key factor that is hard to ignore for enterprises. Now the question arises as to how to set up this dashboard. This is where InfinCE can be your solution. 

The comprehensive enterprise digital platform of InfinCE allows you to create powerful employee management and an operational dashboard that serves all purposes outlined above. Get in touch with us to explore how InfinCE can be the game changer in your workforce operations.