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One of these are Internal Blogs. There will be instances where communication seems to be slow and stagnant. These delays and setbacks can make all the difference in how workflow and progress is made within a particular project. Should there ever be an instance where communication is not up to par to company policy or regulation, it could hamper or cause destructive consequences to that companies reputation or even risk putting the entire system into jeopardy. If one part of the system is corrupted, it can result in a ripple effect that can affect every part of the company. Internal blogs confront issues with communication between fellow business partners and organizations in an effort to produce more effective, more efficient ways to communicate with one another in a collective means to stay on track with upcoming projects or deadlines. In addition, they also help a company be vocal and provide feedback with other business members in an “informal manner”. Emails are often unorganized and messy at best. Internal Blogs organizes organization consciousness in one region, and establishes an area where questions are posed and answers are provided.

 

Communifire is among many intranet blogging platforms that have received high esteem in terms of its effectiveness, stability and reliability amongst companies. It improves the collaboration, cohesion and expression of employees by improving the flow of communication between the users in the workplace. Likewise, it also allows users to exchange information with one another, different ideas, points of view, and solutions to help an organization to solve a problem in a fast and effective way. It also makes them stronger and more knowledgeable in completing a task to its fullest capacity with minimal error. It’s a workplace social network that creates an interconnected web of people that spread ideas from one group to the next, much like the global village metaphor of Web 2.0. It allows one person to pose an idea, concern, or concept that is then discussed and critiqued by other people or other groups in the workspace. Likewise, it also keeps employees informed and aware of company goals that are to be reached. 

In retrospect, Communifire is building strong, solid relationships with employees that improve the productivity and efficiency of that company. It builds up solid solutions to issues whether it’s company internal affairs or obstacles that interfere with a company goal. Likewise, it also helps build strong customer relations with a company by giving customers a voice to provide feedback and voice concerns with a company, to which a company can then respond, and make improvements. What’s significant about Communifire is that it’s set up on a secure internet connection that will not be meddled or tainted by internet saboteurs. Communifire works on multiple mobile devices including Windows Desktop software. A disadvantage that could be noted is the cost. Unlike Zoom (which we’ll discuss later), the software require it’s user to pay for their membership. Memberships can get pricey depending on your subscription. Communifire also tends to have bug related issues with software, the signup process is noted to be overwhelming, and there are some features like Google Docs that have yet to be integrated. There are certainly some grounds for improvement. Overall, Communifire, despite it’s issues, is one of the most highly ranked internal blogs to be used by companies thus far. 

 

Rather than spend almost an entire hour searching through your inbox for important group announcements or updates, the Internal blog could reduce that time significantly as everything from contact information, status updates, and urgent group announcements, are all saved and stored within that blog (5 reasons why your company should run an Internal Blog). They also help you grow and learn from one another because you are constantly sharing your knowledge and wisdom between one another, absorbing various perspectives and applying them in a way that helps improve your expertise on the idea or concept so that you are better equipped and more informed to complete that task correctly and more efficiently (5 reasons why your company should run an Internal Blog). On one final note, it allows employees to express their concerns freely in an environment that is less intimidating than what one would usually feel in a face-to-face environment. Should you find something unfair in company policy or regulation, the internal blog helps bring these issues to surface and may cultivate discussion on that issue that may rapidly spread from one person to many other people, and possibly reach the management of that company and cultivate a response that may help solve the issue resulting in the change of internal policy. In retrospect, Internal blogs allow a company to maintain consistent communication, be vocal regarding specific issues or company affairs, provide the grounds for meaningful discussion that improve the effectiveness and cohesion of an organization, and keep an organization updated in a timely manner in an organized webspace. EZ

Internal Blogs / Communifire

As we see in so many advertisements online and on television, video conferencing is such a profound and effective way at maintaining communication in the workspace. Should you perhaps be absent from the meeting due to illness or unexpected circumstances, video conferencing allows you to maintain contact and be present with your fellow compatriots without being present in the conference room. To this end, the employee can still be an active participant in the conference, provide feedback, and receive information from the participants in the conference room. This medium of communication technology also confronts the communication void within corporate firms and businesses abroad. 

 

Zoom is among one of the best tools used by organizations to deal with the communication void. It’s free and costs nothing to access it. The Interface is simple and easy to use. It bridges “HD video conferencing, online business meetings, webinars, and mobile capabilities in one collaborative solution”. It’s an app that could be used on mobile platforms whether it’s a mobile tablet, Phone or desktop computers that allows its users to connect instantly with the conference by finding the meeting link. In addition, it’s infrastructure is vastly efficient in terms with it’s cloud software via Zoom Connector. It is fast to download and it's also free of charge. Prialto, a business firm, states that “Zoom provides you the ability to scale capacity quickly and easily whenever you need to by adding VMS” (Anreise,2017). It’s stable and reliable in terms of its functionality with the company’s computer systems. Prialto originally had to use two seperate communication technologies in order to maintain a singular work space (Anreise, 2017). Instead, they chose to use Zoom and it worked much faster and helped them create a singular work space without having to balance two different communication technologies. It saved time and it was simple to use. Zoom connects all participants into one meeting by allowing them to share information, annotate or message with another as these conferences take shape (Anreise, 2017). There is also an entire supply of resources that help the company navigate and develop an expertise for the software to in turn develop stronger video conferences. Zoom is completely wireless and curbs the excessive madness of wired connections cluttering the conference room. It’s interface is very much touch screen oriented, a very effective contribution in terms of the software’s ease of use (Anreise, 2017).It also allows up to 50 people to join in. Conferences are recorded and stored within the app’s database to be viewed again should a participant miss a conference. A disadvantage that could be noted for this software is “sign up process”. Andrew Baird states that it’s confusing in a way that “you’re not quite sure what addons you need and don’t”. (Baird, 2017). Live Consulting, an IT software website, acknowledges that the software doesn’t consist of “real time document sharing” at this time. 

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In terms of its media richness, Video Conferencing is particularly strong because a message can be disseminated more effectively if one is making contact with other person on the grounds of face-to-face interaction that is maintained. Video Conferencing allows a participant to be more engaged and may be more connected with the organization than what they would typically experience on an online, virtual environment because both can get a sense of whether or not they are engaged or not judging by the nonverbal communication or body cues they express. With virtual interaction, you cannot respond to your fellow employees because there is a limited foreknowledge of what a person feels or thinks given the lack of nonverbal information required. Video Conferencing can help steward a company’s business on other important, integral components to their sustenance without having to spend a rather large chunk of their financial budget on planning a trip elsewhere to different meeting place far from their company’s current occupation. It lessens the gap between two or more companies that are partnered, to still be actively present in a meeting without having to go through the trouble of planning and budgeting for the trip to meet with these companies in person. It’s more efficient and more effective in keeping the system consistently moving without a setback as simple as planning an expensive trip. To this end, you and other employees are aware and on top of organization updates, and urgent calls that require your attention. Much like Internal Blogs, they help members of organization stay on target for specific goals and maintain constant awareness of deadlines that are to be met in a timely manner. Videoconferencing helps construct more intimate, more cohesive relationships with their employees when they are face to face than what they would from a virtual internal blog. In addition, Video Conferencing also helps maintain the flow of communication. According to a survey conducted by Forbes Insights in July 2017, “62% of employees agree that relative to audio conferencing, video conferencing significantly improves the quality of communication”. (Insights Team, 2017) It also shows that “50% of those surveyed believe video conferencing improves the degree of understanding”.(Insights Team, 2017)  When employees are conferencing with one another via video calls, something extraordinary takes shape just in those instances. Regions of our brain called the “inferior temporal, superior parietal, and orbitofrontal cortexes”, are activated. (Insights Team, 2017) These regions are instrumental in the retention and absorption of visual information. We are more apt to respond, receive, absorb, and process information that is transmitted visually than what we normally would through audio or literary forms of information. (Insights Team, 2017). EZ

Video Conferencing / Zoom

DropBox is a cloud computing storage application that allows teams and individuals to save documents, pictures, downloads and various other things that people would like to share with others or have in a safe place. When it comes to looking at how a team at a certain company would use DropBox, it becomes a very useful tool. Generally, employees have reports and such that they need to do on a daily basis and share it with others. This requires employees to have multiple tabs open, switching every few minutes, and looking at various other documents to fulfill the report. With having DropBox, employees would be able to share with each other all the things they need to fulfill their daily tasks all in one app. We tend to have a short attention span in this generation and it is getting tougher for people to have so many different apps and tabs open at the same time and continuously changes tabs and apps to get a various amount of information.  

 

DropBox was created for our work to be made smarter and easier by being in one place. One of the advantages of DropBox is that it is able to reach as many people as you need it to reach. As mentioned previously, being able to bring all the files you need to bring and save them into an online cloud, increases productivity as we bring all these multiple applications into one place. Another advantage of DropBox is the ability to use it for your own personal gain. DropBox can be free for users who do not need a lot of storage space and just want to backup up documents or pictures that they want to keep. 

The same perspective of advantage can also be seen as a disadvantage. With the advancements that we have in technology, comes the ability to bring it down through other means with the same technology. There are those who attempt and sometimes successfully break into other clouds in an attempt to steal somebody’s information. As somebody who has lost a social media account to hacking, it is very important that what goes on your DropBox, is not as personal as you can get. This is the problem with technology such as DropBox coming into our lives. We get so used to the fact that we can take whatever we want a back it up on the internet, we tend to forget that there is somebody always out there looking for those kind of things to take.

Another issue with DropBox is that it should not be the only place you store your memories because you are not in control of your account as much as you think. Another disadvantage of using DropBox sparingly, is that accounts that are not used after a few months, are deleted, along with the content they were saving. The idea that the things we save could be in the internet forever would be washed away if we assumed we could just save something there and come back to it whenever we wanted. AB

DropBox

Now we look at something similar, but different in some ways, Google Drive. When it comes to advancements in technology we can always count on Google to be in the mix for everything, trying to keep up with the competitors around it. One of the things about Google and Google drive is the accessibility of it and how easy it is to use. Google has always prided itself on making their products easier for consumers to use, in turn, giving people a reason to use things such as Google Drive.

For example, take something like Google Docs that are also uploaded to Google Drive. As a student, I tend to work with other students throughout the semester in different classes so that we could get group projects done together. Currently, I have seven different Google Docs in Google Drive that I work on with other people to get various assignments done. The accessibility of Google has allowed myself and other students to put our work together in one space consistently instead of having us all having separate documents and having to put them together. 

Google Drive also has the same disadvantages though as something like DropBox does. In this day and age there are always people trying to get into whatever application you choose to store information. Hackers will always be a disadvantage of this kind of technology, but that is a consequence that we suffer from making our lives more technology reliant.

Overall, these cloud computing systems have made our lives easier, they have made companies faster in getting things done because of the ability that they have to put what they need into one space. These applications have given students a free platform to collaborate on projects together so that they may succeed as one. AB

Google Drive

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