Unified messaging is quickly growing in popularity among businesses and private individuals alike, and for good reason: by using a unified messaging system, it's possible to receive a number of different types of messages through a single access point instead of needing a different type of access for each message. This can be especially advantageous for businesses, as it allows them to reduce the amount of equipment that they need while making their communications systems much more efficient. If you have been considering switching your company to unified messaging but are wanting to make sure that it's right for your business needs, then consider the following in order to see whether this is the messaging solution that you've been looking for. An All-in-One Solution By choosing unified messaging for your company, you will be getting an all-in-one solution for all of your messaging needs. Unified messaging allows your employees to receive voice messages, faxes, e-mail, text messages, and even video messages all through their computer, cellular phone, or other access points. E-mail, faxes, and other text messages can even be received as audio through standard telephones, with text-to-phone technology that is available with many unified messaging services; even if the service that you choose does not offer this feature, your employees will still be able to receive alerts telling them what types of messages they have when using a phone, and will be able to access all of their messages via their cellular phone or over the internet. Less Equipment to Maintain Because unified messaging doesn't require separate machines for each type of message your employees might receive, there is much less equipment which must be bought and maintained. Additionally, the unified messaging system won't require paper, ink, or other resources the way that fax machines and some other messaging systems might; any faxes or text-based messages can be read and printed out as needed from an employee's computer, or simply listened to via telephone with a text-to-voice enabled unified messaging system. Productivity and Cost Effectiveness There are other advantages to using a unified messaging system, as well. Employees can spend more time focusing on their work instead of having to wait by the fax machine or visit another part of the office every time they need to send certain items off. Though the time spent doing these sorts of tasks may seem trivial, over the course of the day this can add up into a significant amount of time. This can give your employees a little extra time to get their work done, and they will be instantly alerted when the fax or message that they were waiting for arrives. If your employees travel a lot or are often out of the office, unified messaging can be even more useful. Many unified messaging systems have features which enable messages to be sent to a variety of different access points, trying each in order so that your employee can receive their message alert regardless of whether they're in the office or away on a job. This can save valuable time as well as trips back and forth from the job site and office to check messages or receive faxes that may be vital to the work that they are doing. Source: Ezinearticles

A virtual team — also known as a geographically dispersed team (GDT) — is a group of individuals who work across time, space, and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technology. Members of virtual teams communicate electronically, as they may never meet face to face.  Many Global teams have team members spread out over the globe. GDT present collaborative challenges which can be overcome with a combination of best practices and Collaboration software.  Here are some special techniques that can be used to manage these virtual teams. #1: Establish team objectives The team members need to know and understand what it is that they are doing together. If they understand only their own role and their own work, they will always just be individual contributors. #2: Remind everyone they are a team If the team members think they are all working independently, they will act independent. If they know they are part of a team working on common objectives and deliverables, they will tend to feel better about their work and be more active in their collaboration with other team members. #3: Establish ground rules Even though the team members may be remote, they still need to exhibit a common and acceptable set of behaviors. In fact, this is probably more important for virtual teams. Ground rules include things like setting the hours during which the team members are expected to be working, establishing lunch times, determining which meetings are mandatory (in-person, Web-based, or via telephone), and defining expectations for communication turnaround times #4: Obtain the right technology I suppose there have always been virtual teams. However, this trend has accelerated in the past few years. The technology is there to support virtual teams — there is really no reason to be without it. This includes fast access to the Internet, audio conferencing, videocams, collaborative software, and shared directories. #5: Look for opportunities to socialize Team members located together have opportunities to socialize throughout the day. Virtual teams don’t usually have this same opportunity to interact with each other, so it is more important for the project manager to look for ways they can bond. This might include getting everyone together one time in a face-to-face setting — perhaps for a project kickoff meeting. #6: Be sensitive to cultural differences It’s possible that your virtual team all thinks and acts the same way. However, more and more virtual teams consist of people from multiple countries and cultures. If you are the project manager on this type of team, make sure you have some appreciation for the differences in how people work and how they behave. #7: Proactive Communication You need to be extra proactive in your communications to make sure everyone understands what is expected. People can start to feel isolated if they do not receive regular communications. It is hard enough to keep everyone informed on a “regular” project. The communication lines on a virtual team must be opened up especially wide. As project manager, you can provide this steady stream of communication. #8: Adjust and compromise on time differences Remember that what’s convenient for you may not always be convenient to the team members. I was on a project team at a large global company where the manager insisted that team meetings start at 9:00 am. That was convenient for him but resulted in hard feeling from people in other locations who needed to stay very late for these meetings. #9: Be extra diligent in workload management Be precise and explicit in assigning work to the virtual team members. You also need to ensure that work is completed on time. #10: Give people shorter assignments This is not the time to give people long assignments and hope that they are completed by the deadline. Instead of assigning a six-week activity, for instance, assign the work in three two-week activities. In the former case, you won’t know for sure if the work was done for six weeks. In the latter case, you can tell every two weeks if the work is on track. Source: TechRepublic

Sharing Email Templates within the Team Today, businesses and organizations depend more and more on email correspondence than ever before. Email presents numerous opportunities for you to provide better, faster communication to improve customer service, sales, employee relations or project implementation. Many times, however, the email management and response process can become congested by recurrence and human error.  Email Templates saves time, increases efficiency, and can be easily used by anyone who uses email.

• Provides an efficient way to answer email
• Helps you stay connected with your customers
• Enhances your on-line customer relationships
• Strengthens internal communication efforts
• Presents personalized professional communication
• Helps you retain a high level of quality and service

In Taroby, it is possible to create templates and then give access rights of that template to anyone in your team. So, Managers can easily delegate drafting of emails to any team member and also ensure the quality of work done with the  'Send after Approval' feature in Taroby. Source: emailtemplates.com

Startup Company from Waiheke Island launches new Product designed to improve the Workflow within SMBs by reducing Information Overload. Auckland 12th May 2009: Email is one of the most efficient ways of communication in our time. At least you'd think so. But in recent years, increased email traffic has resulted in jammed inboxes, unfinished work and frustrated workers. “Email is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives”, says Karen Renaud of Glasgow University. With a team of academics including a computer scientist, psychologist and a statistician she surveyed 177 people and found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. This means that people who check their email every five minutes waste a whole working day - or 8.5 hours a week - figuring out what they were doing moments before. As a result, more than one third of workers feel stressed by the sheer number of emails and the obligation to respond quickly. Toby Ruckert, a serial entrepreneur who came up with the concept of TAROBY says: “Such findings confirm what we've been predicting for several years now. When we first came to New Zealand in 2002, we already had established business operations overseas, but New Zealand and its people fascinated us. My wife and I wanted to stay. The biggest difficulty for us was to retain an effective means of communication with our different businesses on the other side of the world without being personally present at all times. However there was simply no suitable software available so we had to completely reinvent the wheel.” After years of development and beta-testing, this new application which could completely change the way we look at email today, will finally be unveiled on the upcoming Bizzone Business Expo in Auckland. “Gone are the days when the stream of incoming messages could create havoc, because no one knew who is handling what. TAROBY is a new generation email client that makes your inbox a “Team Dashboard” and allows you to create, manage and share email messages among team members and access them anytime, from anywhere - helping organisations to improve their internal and external communication.” says Aby Varghese, CTO and Co-Founder of TAROBY International Limited. Research indicates that Ruckert and Varghese are on to something: Latest findings of Basex, a leading information analyst firm suggests that today's “Information Overload” costs the U.S. economy alone a minimum of US$ 900 billion per year in lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation. A study conducted by the Henley Business Management School in the UK says that the average manager loses 3.5 years of his entire life attending to completely unnecessary emails. TAROBY stands for “Team Automated Response Optimisation – BY YOU” and aims to change this stressful outlook by putting people back in control of their workspace. But come and see the future of email for yourself: Visit TAROBY @ stall 148c on the Auckland Business Expo in Greenlane from 27th - 29th May 2009. ENDS About TAROBY International Limited TAROBY International Limited is an IT startup company on Waiheke Island. It was founded by Toby Ruckert and Aby Varghese who already own a software development company “AMT” (Advanced Millennium Technologies) in Bangalore, India. Toby and Aby started working together purely via the internet in 2002 and quickly realized the need for better communication software in the future which eventually lead to the development and foundation of TAROBY in New Zealand. The mission statement for Taroby is "to universally connect people and cultures; to make private and business lives easier, by developing creative software solutions that focus on innovation, design, usability and efficiency, thus enabling the individual user to spend time more meaningful every moment”. For photos or further information, please contact us.