​For most businesses, the pandemic has been a huge disruption – but some have benefited. Delivery services, online supermarkets and streaming sites have all boomed. Perhaps none has seen such a meteoric rise as Zoom.

Zoom’s growth isn’t simply a case of offering the right service at the right time. There were plenty of online meeting platforms to choose from, including 8×8, Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams, but Zoom was the one that broke out of the business realm to facilitate remote pub quizzes, online fitness classes and virtual family get-togethers.

A key reason is the ease of use. Zoom made it supremely easy to invite non-subscribers into your meetings, and for those people to join. In the first half of 2020, as its name became synonymous with video conferencing, it became an obvious default option for businesses seeking a reliable, familiar way for employees to communicate during lockdown.

Now, although pandemic restrictions are finally easing, many organisations intend to allow employees to keep working from home, at least part of the time. And for businesses that settled on Zoom – or some other service – at the start of the pandemic, that raises an important question. Is the service still the right solution for an era where video calls are not a stopgap solution but an integral, ongoing part of your working practices?

As Stefan Walther, CEO of communications solution provider 3CX points out, the downsides of Zoom are starting to become apparent. “A lot of people don’t need the extent of the feature set,” Walther told PC Pro. “It’s a great platform; it works very well, but it comes with a hefty price tag, per-user licences with a lot of add-ons, and a quite expensive dial-in feature.”

It’s time to explore your alternatives – and one you might not have considered is hosting your own videoconferencing service.

Free and easy

You don’t necessarily need to pay for fully functional conferencing software. Jitsi is a complete free-to-use open-source option that includes end-to-end encryption and integration with Google, Microsoft products and Slack. First appearing under the name SIP communicator in the early 2000s, it’s now run by communications specialist 8×8, which supports the ongoing development of Jitsi alongside its commercial hosted videoconferencing solution.

To get started with Jitsi, you just need something to run the back-end on. Server code for Debian/Ubuntu and Docker can be downloaded for free, along with a range of support packages on GitHub, plus Chrome extensions, iOS and Android apps. Jitsi rooms can be embedded in your own website, and there’s a hosted web front-end at meet.jit.si for anyone who doesn’t want to host it themselves.

If you’re wondering whether Jitsi is good enough for your company, be reassured that some big names rely on it – including Wikimedia, which hosts its own public portal. In choosing a video platform, the organisation said it found that, for meetings of 10-15 participants, Jitsi’s performance was “subjectively on par with Google Meet and Zoom”.

Indeed, the developer says the platform is suitable for hosting unlimited free meetings with up to 100 simultaneous participants – although if you need a bigger capacity, or advanced features such as closed captioning, moderation and analytics, it recommends you step up to the paid-for 8×8 Meet service.

While Jitsi can be appealing for certain scenarios, it’s not your only free option. Google Hangouts, Cisco Webex and others allow free meetings for limited numbers of participants or limited times; 3CX only starts charging for its hosted conferencing solution after the first year’s use.

Web conferencing for education

Another free, open-source option is BigBlueButton. It’s a popular choice in education settings: having emerged from the Technology Innovation Management program at Canada’s Carleton University, it’s now supported by more than three quarters of the worldwide market for learning management systems (LMSes).

BigBlueButton is straightforward to deploy. The server runs happily on 64-bit Ubuntu 18.04 inside a Docker container, and it uses no client software at all, relying instead on native browser features. This makes it ideal for home-teaching environments, but also for businesses seeking an easy way to ensure that employees can stay in touch, regardless of what device they’re using or where.

As you’d expect, some of BigBlueButton’s features have a distinctly educational flavour. It supports online whiteboards and allows hosts to pick a random user to answer questions. Like many videoconferencing platforms, it allows the participants to raise a digital hand to ask a question or offer a response, and the host can click to lower all raised hands at once.

However, BigBlueButton sports a range of business staples, such as document sharing and breakout rooms, along with screen sharing and integration with CMS software as well as LMS tools.

Reasons to run your own server

Installing and managing your own videoconferencing solution is more complex than opting for a ready-made alternative, but it has benefits. Businesses and educational establishments can more finely tune their spending and back-end management, as well as gain greater control over add-ons and the location of data.

With third-party services, this type of control varies considerably between the different providers. Zoom account owners and administrators can customise which data centre regions they use for hosting real-time meetings and webinar data, although the default is locked to the region in which your account was originally provisioned.

With 3CX there’s more flexibility. CEO Stefan Walther told us that, on his company’s platform, “you’re always 100% in charge of your location, your data and the people you invite”. There’s no need to install a dedicated app if you’re happy to host meetings in the browser, and British users’ data will stay within the UK while European user data resides within the EU.

Skype for Business is another service that supports a self-hosted back end; however, owner Microsoft is currently encouraging customers to ditch Skype and move onto Teams instead, which resides wholly on Microsoft’s own servers.

Another factor to consider is the breadth of services you require. Buy into 3CX’s integrated communications service and you’re getting more than just a videoconferencing solution: it’s a fully featured PBX with a lot of extras, including VoIP for regular phone calling, messaging and presence tools, with support for both software clients and physical phones. Skype for Business has a similarly wide-ranging feature set. Having all of this in one place can help productivity, as employees don’t need to mess about switching between multiple tools, but smaller businesses often won’t need to go beyond video, group chat and messaging.

Managing your own service – even if it’s not hosted on your own hardware but cloud services such as Azure or AWS – means that you’re free to switch providers when you choose, or even migrate to an alternative videoconferencing platform entirely. Should you instead choose to roll hosting and app provision into a single payment, you don’t have this flexibility: there might be a minimum lock-in, and even if you migrate because your current provider no longer meets your requirements, there may be residual bills to be paid.

Support and hosting

While features are an important consideration when choosing a conferencing platform, another critical issue is support. A communications server is a key piece of business infrastructure, and you’ll need the expertise to keep it running. In many instances – but by no means all – a charged-for service will often be easier to get up and running more quickly. Likewise, less tech-savvy end users may find it easier to work on the move if they can do so using apps, rather than a mobile browser.

Some services have quick setup wizards for easy deployment, but others expect a significant level of technical know-how on the part of administrators, which may make them an impractical choice for smaller organisations, at least as far as self-hosting is concerned. Even for the larger enterprise, an option that requires constant monitoring could justify adding one to the head count which, over the course of a year, could end up costing just as much as opting for a provider-hosted alternative.

At the same time, depending on which path you choose, you may also have limited recourse to external support. Jitsi, for example, warns that “neither the immediate Jitsi team or 8×8 provide commercial support for Jitsi. Jitsi does enjoy a large developer community with many development shops and individuals that provide support and commercial development services. If you need help, we recommend you do a search or post a request on our Community Forum.” It’s better than nothing, but you might have trouble convincing the board that this is a viable solution.

You’ll need suitable server hardware too. Thankfully, this isn’t a big ask: most services don’t need a ton of resources and will run in a container or virtual machine. Alternatively, you can use a very lightweight dedicated system; Jitsi and 3CX can both be installed on Raspberry Pi devices, for a terrifically cheap one-box solution.

TrueConf is another commercial service that supports the Raspberry Pi – and even allows you to download a ready-made Linux-based image that’s preinstalled with the conferencing software and all necessary documentation.

Redundancy

Running an on-site videoconferencing solution can cut ongoing costs, but it risks creating a single point of failure if your local infrastructure goes down. For this reason, even if you’re happy to own and manage your own communications services, it can make sense to let someone else host the server: cloud-based services should have contingencies for outages and multiple lines with automatic failover.

Many of the solutions discussed here can be hosted on the Azure, AWS or Google Cloud platforms. Amazon’s own Chime communications service, which runs on AWS, goes one step further, offering an SDK that developers can use to integrate its features into their own web or mobile applications, including SIP trunking, chat, collaboration and screen sharing.

Zoom out?

If you’ve only ever thought of videoconferencing as a closed, third-party service, the potential of setting up and operating your own services can be liberating – and economical. However, it also means taking on responsibilities – for installation, for maintenance, and possibly for loss of business if your system goes down.

Taking a cloud-hosted approach reduces that risk, but brings ongoing connectivity and capacity costs to consider, even if the software you’re running is itself free. And if you opt for a system without professional support then a misconfiguration or corrupted upgrade could also prove costly in engineer hours and lost productivity.

We’d recommend therefore that you don’t rush to ditch your current conferencing service. Today’s crop of commercial systems are robust, well-supported and easy to use – and often easier to roll out within an organisation than a self-managed solution.

Rather, the point is this: in past years, online videoconferencing might have seemed like a luxury or a gimmick. That’s no longer the case. Videoconferencing is right at the heart of business, and likely to remain there for a long time to come. It’s time to take a fresh look at your needs, and weigh up whether the time is right to take these crucial services into your own hands.

You might think you’re being careful about what post on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – but over time your accumulated posts will inevitably build up a picture of who you are. That could include where you reside, what you do for a living, your childhood, your family composition, your birthday and more. All of which would be valuable information to a potential identity thief.

As an example, let’s say you post a picture of your child blowing out candles on a cake. Unless the metadata has been stripped first, you’ve probably also shared the date on which the picture was taken. If your child is young, it’s unlikely they waited until the weekend to celebrate, so there’s a good chance the date it was taken was their birthday itself, even if you didn’t post it until a few days later. If there are three candles on the cake, or a card with a number on it, that’s the other half of the equation: anyone seeing your post now knows exactly when your child was born. If you’ve used their birthday – or part of it – in a password or security question, that’s a chink in your digital armour right there, ripe for exploitation.

That’s not the worst of it. If you took the picture on your phone, the exact GPS coordinates of the place where it was taken could be embedded into the image file. That’s probably your home address, so anyone who sees the picture now knows exactly where to find that nice painting hanging in the background. If you’re a married woman and your friends list includes family members, it won’t be hard to deduce your maiden name – another common security question.

The list goes on. Photos of your first car, connections to school friends… every seemingly innocuous detail makes you more vulnerable to exploits and scams. And now consider the data you’ve scattered outside of social networks – CVs uploaded to job sites, links stored in a cloud-based bookmarking tool, ads you’ve clicked on, the emails you’ve received in a webmail inbox and the places you’ve been with your phone in your pocket.

Whether this data has escaped through over-sharing or been collected without your noticing, you can never get rid of it all. But you can shrink it down – and the obvious place to start is social media.

Shrink your Facebook footprint

Facebook is currently involved in a dispute with Apple over what information it’s able to collect about users – but if you’ve ever used the platform then there’s no doubt that it already knows plenty about you.

To find out what information Facebook is holding, log in through a browser and click the down arrow in the top-right corner. Click “Settings & privacy”, followed by Settings. Select “Your Facebook information” in the sidebar, then “Download your information”. Leave the default settings as they are and click “Create file”. It will take a short while for Facebook to collect the relevant information. When it’s finished, you’ll be able to download a ZIP file, whose contents you can peruse to see what’s stored against your name on Facebook’s servers. Armed with this data, you can decide what stays – and what should be removed.

Deleting content from Facebook is surprisingly easy, especially if you use the Manage Activity tool; this lets you remove batches of information at a time, rather than just individual items. The catch is, it’s currently only available in the Facebook mobile app. To access it, tap the menu button on the toolbar, then hit “Settings & privacy”, followed by Settings. Now select “Activity log”; to remove individual entries, tap the three dots on the right of the screen beside each one. To delete several entries at once, tap “Manage activity” and pick whether you want to manage posts, activity you’re tagged in or interactions such as likes, reactions and comments.

Whichever you choose, Facebook will pull up a list of the ten most recent data points, and scrolling down the screen will extend the list. Tap the box beside each item you want to remove, or tap the box at the top of the list to select everything that’s shown on the page (you might want to scroll down to extend the list a few times). Finally, tap the remove or recycle button – depending on what you’re deleting – at the bottom of the screen.

You can also delete content through a browser – it’s just more time consuming. Log in and click the down arrow at the top of the screen, followed by “Settings and privacy” and Settings. Click “Your Facebook information”, followed by “Activity log”. As you hover over each item in the sidebar, three dots will appear on top of it, allowing you to unlike things you have liked or move content you’ve posted to the archive or recycle bin.

While these functions let you manage your publicly accessible content, you should be aware that Facebook also collects data to make internal decisions about what to show you. To review this, select “Privacy shortcuts” from the “Settings & privacy” menu and then “Review your ad preferences” (in the “Ad preferences” box) or “Manage your information” (in the “Your Facebook information” box).

If you’re reviewing your ad preferences, click “Ad settings” in the sidebar and work your way through each of the sections in the “Manage data used to show you ads” section. Some of the settings you’ll find here let you prevent advertisers from reaching you on third-party websites based on your Facebook data, while others let you see the content categories Facebook thinks you’re interested in.

This latter information can be quite eye-opening. It’s not always spot-on: I discovered that I was being targeted for content related to Assassin’s Creed, yet I haven’t played a computer game in more than 20 years (not even for career development). For the most part, though, the list was scarily accurate – it even knew the brand of watch I wear. There are links on the page that let you remove any categories that don’t apply, or which you’d simply prefer Facebook not to use for targeting.

If you want to get off Facebook altogether, the “Manage your information” section provides links to delete your data and close your account. If you’re hesitant about leaving the platform because you don’t want to lose touch with friends or family members who are using Facebook Messenger, there’s good news; it is possible to continue using Messenger for instant messages even after deactivating your main Facebook account.

If you decide to take the plunge, point your browser at Facebook’s account deactivation page, enter your password, complete the form and click Deactivate.

Instagram

You might imagine that Facebook-owned Instagram would offer similar levels of control over your content. Sadly, that’s not the case: you can discover a lot about the metrics that are used to determine what you’re shown in the app, but you can’t always correct or delete any incorrect inferences.

To see what Instagram thinks of you, open the app and tap your icon at the end of the toolbar, followed by the three lines at the top of the next page. Tap Settings followed by “Ads | Ad topics” and untick subjects that don’t interest you. If you tap into Security, rather than Ads, and hit “Access data”, you can see your apparent interests in blocks by selecting “View all” under “Ad interests” – but you can’t delete items recorded here.

What you can do is flag unwanted adverts individually. Tap the three dots above them in your feed then tap “Hide ad”. You can specify whether the ad is irrelevant, shown too often or inappropriate.

Shrink your Twitter footprint

Last year Twitter was hit by an embarrassing security breach that gave hackers access to numerous high-profile accounts, exposing all sorts of personal information associated with those accounts.

What information is Twitter keeping about you? To find out, log in through a browser and click More in the sidebar, followed by “Settings and privacy”. As with Facebook, the information is provided as a bulk download: with “Your account” selected in the second sidebar, click “Download an archive of your data” in the third, and enter your password. Click the “Request archive” button and Twitter will compile a Zip file. It will send you an email when it’s ready for collection.

Once you know what kind of information is in the database, you can make more informed decisions going forward. There are also some specific settings that it’s worth looking at (all of the menu options mentioned below are found under the “Privacy and safety” section of Twitter’s settings).

If you want to restrict your tweets so they can be read only by people who actively follow you, click “Audience and tagging” and click the box beside “Protect your tweets”. While you’re in this section, you can optionally disable photo tagging too, which stops people identifying you in photos they post to their own profiles. Once you’ve protected your tweets, you’ll be asked to authorise any future follower requests, rather than allowing anyone who wishes to follow you do so.

A specific privacy issue that we mentioned earlier is the possibility of giving away your whereabouts. To prevent Twitter from reporting your location, click “Your tweets”, then “Add location information to your tweets”. Untick the box and, optionally, click the link to wipe location data from tweets you’ve posted in the past.

Again, like Facebook, Twitter builds up an internal profile of you that’s used to select ads and suggest content. You can review this and remove specific interests from your record as you wish. To do so, click “Content you see | Interests” and untick the box for each subject you’d rather not hear about.

As for items you’ve actively shared, it’s easy to delete individual tweets by clicking the three dots icon on each one and selecting “Delete tweet”. Twitter doesn’t provide any way to remove whole batches of posts, but a number of third-party services have sprung up to plug the gap – check out tweetdeleter.com, twitwipe.com, or tweeteraser.com. If that’s not good enough, you may choose to go the whole hog and delete your Twitter account.

Shrink your Google footprint

Google offers an extraordinary range of products and services, many of which collect a whole lot of personal information – either for publication or for internal usage. Fortunately, the company also provides a single centralised dashboard from which you can keep track of everything that’s being stored about you across Google’s numerous sites and apps. To access it, start by navigating to myaccount.google.com and logging in.

Once you’re authenticated, a good place to begin is Google’s Activity controls page. Here you’ll find options to turn off whole categories of data collection, including location data, data gathered by Google-owned websites and Chrome, and data collected by devices such as your phone and tablet.

You can also limit what information is collected and used by YouTube: this will probably cause you to receive less relevant video recommendations, but you may not consider that a great price to pay for enhanced privacy.

At the bottom of the page there’s a link to the advertising settings page. If you want to see random ads, rather than ones based on your behaviour, just click off the switch labelled “Ad personalisation”. This only affects advertising on Google sites, but if you visit the Your Online Choices website you can similarly turn off advert personalisation for dozens of different companies.

If you want to remove your own content from your Google account – such as contacts, calendars, Drive data, ebooks, Play store purchases and so forth – it’s a good idea to download an archive of your content in advance, just as with Facebook and Twitter, which you can do from the Account Dashboard. When you visit this page you’ll see a long list of all the Google services that your identity is connected to; to download data for any of these individual services, click the down arrow to expand it, then click the three dots at the bottom of its card, followed by “Download data”. Clicking the main “Download your data” link at the top of the page will download a complete archive of content from all the various services.

Bear in mind that this page only shows information for the currently logged-in Google account. If you have multiple accounts – one for work and a personal account, for instance – you’ll need to repeat this process for each one. You can keep track of which identity you’re using by checking the account image at the top right of the dashboard pages.

Shrink your Microsoft footprint

Like Google, Microsoft has helpfully centralised a lot of its privacy settings in a unified dashboard. You can download a copy of your activity by clicking “Download your data”, followed by “Create new archive”. The file that’s delivered will include things like your search and location history and other personal information, but it won’t include data generated in applications such as Office Online or the Outlook calendar. To download those items, you’ll need to go into each product and manually make a copy of whatever you want to keep.

One information repository that’s of particular interest is what’s known as Cortana’s Notebook. Microsoft is scaling back Cortana as a general-purpose voice assistant, but since its introduction 

 which is where Cortana keeps track of things it’s learned about you, to help it provide relevant answers to any questions. You’ll find a link to this at the top of the Privacy page, with the data broken into sections covering topics such as your commute, weather preferences, news stories that interest you, stocks you’re tracking and so on. The more information Cortana has squirrelled away, the more effective it will be – but, if you’d rather wipe what it knows, click “Clear Cortana data” in the right-hand sidebar.

Like Facebook and Google, Microsoft also provides an easy way to opt out of so-called behavioural advertising, which by default serves up content based on what it knows about you. To do so, visit Microsoft’s Ad settings page and turn off all of the switches for personalisation.

Don’t forget to also check your privacy settings in Windows itself. Press Windows+I to open the Settings app and click Privacy, then use the switches to manage what the operating system can and can’t do. The standard settings allow the OS to show ads based on your interests and websites to access your language lists to provide locally relevant content, but these can be turned off at the flick of a switch. You can use the App permissions link at the left to block third-party apps from accessing information such as your location and account settings too.

Prevention is better than cure

The companies we’ve focused on above have huge databases of personal information, but don’t think your digital footprint stops there. It also extends to, for instance, the online supermarket that brings your groceries, the public library you use to download ebooks, your favourite digital magazine stores and anywhere you’ve ever saved your credit card details.

To audit and curate exactly what all of these services know about you can be a time-consuming business. However, it’s made a lot easier by services such as Rightly, which provides direct links to all manner of companies, with options to see what information they hold about you, to opt out of marketing or to request deletion.

It’s also important to realise that even if you take direct action, close your accounts and ask companies to scrub you from their databases, your information may still be out there somewhere. The things you publish online can find their way into an incalculable number of third-party services, without your ever knowing about it.

The only truly safe course of action, therefore, is never to publish anything that you might regret sharing in the future. If that’s not realistic, the next best option is to lock down any services you actively use from the very start, to prevent them from gathering personally identifiable information in the first place.

Are you continually running out of space on Dropbox, Google Drive or whatever your chosen cloud platform may be? If so, it’s time to take matters into your own hands. Storing files on your own hardware lets you consolidate and synchronise your data without having to worry about storage limitations – and your privacy can also be better protected. Here’s how to set up either a Raspberry Pi or a spare Windows PC as a personal cloud server, using the free ownCloud platform.

Getting started with the Raspberry Pi

You can install and run ownCloud on a regular Raspberry Pi running Raspbian, but getting it working can be a little complicated, as you also need to install and configure web and database services.

To simplify things, therefore, we’ll ditch Raspbian and use the ultra-light DietPi OS distribution instead. This is based on Debian, like the official operating system, but it’s designed to take up as little space as possible (a minimal installation tips the scales at just 400MB) and to streamline the process of installing core apps and services. Thus, when we install ownCloud on DietPi, the web server and database are also automatically installed and set up so that ownCloud can work from the word go.

As DietPi is still a full, multitasking OS, you’re free to install other services on it too. It makes a great starting point for a do-everything device that can live in a cupboard somewhere and perform a broad range of functions on your network – especially if you’re using something as powerful as a Raspberry Pi 4.

Download and install DietPi

To get the DietPi OS image, head to dietpi.com, scroll down to the Download section, click “Raspberry Pi All models”, then click the download icon next to Download Image. 

The DietPi image is stored in 7Z format, which means it can’t be unzipped with Windows’ built-in tools. If you’re not already running it, you can install 7-Zip (7-zip.org) to handle files of this type. Once you’ve extracted the image, you’ll need to write it onto your microSD card: there are plenty of tools that can do this, such as the official Raspberry Pi imager, which is a free download from raspberrypi.org/download.

Once you’ve written the image to the card, you’ll be told you can eject the card – but before doing this, we’ll configure the Raspberry Pi to connect automatically to your wireless network, as this conveniently allows us to set up ownCloud remotely, without needing to hook the Pi up to a monitor and keyboard.

To do this, open up your microSD card in Explorer and open the file dietpi.txt in Notepad. Find the line AUTO_SETUP_NET_WIFI_ENABLED=0 and change the last digit to 1. Save and close the file, then open dietpi-wifi.txt and look for the lines that say aWIFI_SSID[0]=» and aWIFI_KEY[0]=». Enter your Wi-Fi network name between the first pair of quotes, and your password between the second.

Now you can save the file, eject the microSD card, insert it in your Pi and let the Pi boot.

Configure your Pi

Although you can set up DietPi and ownCloud directly on the Pi, we’ll do it from a Windows system over SSH (the Secure Shell protocol). You need to know the Pi’s IP address, which you should be able to find by checking the “Connected devices” list in your router’s administration interface.

Once you have got the address, open the command prompt on your Windows machine and type ssh root@x.x.x.x, entering the Pi’s IP address in place of x.x.x.x. Windows will ask you to confirm you want to connect; type yes. Then enter the Pi root user’s password, which defaults to dietpi. If you don’t get in right away, perform a hard reboot of the Pi – we found this solved an issue when SSH seemed initially unresponsive.

Once you’re connected, the DietPi setup process will complete. We recommend you change the default passwords on the Pi when prompted – just make sure you pick something you can remember, as the passwords you choose will be used as the defaults for any installed applications. At the end of the process, you’ll arrive at the DietPi-Software screen from which you can make further changes and install optimised apps.

We suggest you start by assigning your Pi a static IP address to ensure your cloud server will always be accessible at the same address. To do this, key down to DietPi-Config and press Return, then key down to Network Options: Adapters and press Return again.

Now key up to WiFi and press Return, then select Change Mode. Key down to Copy and press Return: the Pi will now always use your current IP address. In your router’s management interface, set the address to “reserved” to ensure that the router never tries to give it a different one.

Press the right arrow key to select Ok, then press Return; finally, key down to Apply and press Return to restart the network service.

Install ownCloud on the Pi

Now it’s time to return to the DietPi-Software launch screen. This time key down to Software Optimised and press Return to open the list of available applications. It’s a long list, including desktop GUIs, media centres, web servers, Spotify – and ownCloud, which you’ll find as item 47 in the Cloud / Backups section. Press Space to select it, then Tab to highlight Ok and press Return.

You’ll be returned to the DietPi-Software screen. Key down to Install and press Return to download, unpack and set up ownCloud, along with the web server and database software on which it relies. When the process completes, let the Pi reboot.

Once the Pi has restarted, switch back to your web browser, then type x.x.x.x/owncloud, replacing “x.x.x.x” with your Pi’s IP address. Use “admin” for the username, with the password you set earlier (or “dietpi” if you didn’t change the password) to log in.

ownCloud is now up and running on your Pi, and the service should be accessible to any user on your local network. You can use it in a browser, or install the ownCloud desktop client, which runs on various versions of Linux as well as Windows and macOS – you’ll find the installers at owncloud.org/download. If you want to make ownCloud accessible from outside of your network, see opposite. 

Setting up Apache on Windows

Setting up ownCloud on Windows is less straightforward than doing so on the Pi. In fact, ownCloud doesn’t even work with some of the most popular web server and database packages on Windows. Luckily, Windows 10 includes the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which allows us to use Linux components instead.

To get started, you might need to install the subsystem: to do this, right-click the Start button and select Windows PowerShell (Admin). When the UAC prompt appears, confirm that you want to make changes to your PC and then type this command into the PowerShell window:

dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart

Once the subsystem is installed, check it’s running by opening the Services console and selecting “LxssManager”: if it’s not, right-click its name and select Restart from the menu.

The next thing you need to do is install a Linux distribution. There are several to choose from in the Microsoft Store but, as we’ve already set up ownCloud on a Debian-based system on the Pi, we’ll use the Debian-based Ubuntu here. Use the search box in the Store app to locate Ubuntu and install it; when the installation completes, reboot your PC.

Once your computer has restarted, reopen PowerShell with Admin rights and enter Ubuntu . The subsystem will perform some background tasks and then ask you to create a Unix user. Provide a username and password. 

There’s one last thing to do before you start downloading apps, and that’s update the software catalogues: to do this, type sudo apt update and press Return (providing your password if requested).

You can now install the Apache web server by typing sudo apt install apache2 -y and pressing Return. The -y switch tells Apache not to ask for confirmation, so the process will complete without interruption. When it’s done, run the following commands, each on its own line, to enable the optional web server modules required by ownCloud:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

sudo a2enmod headers

Now restart the Apache web server with sudo service apache2 restart. Check that the server is running properly by opening a browser window and pointing it at http://localhost – you should see the Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page.

Setting up MariaDB

Now the web server is running, let’s install the MariaDB database engine. You can do this by entering:

sudo apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client

Installation only takes a few seconds. When it’s complete, enter these commands to start the database server and launch the configuration process:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

sudo mysql_secure_installation

MariaDB will ask for the root password – but there isn’t one yet, so just press Return and, when asked if you want to create a root password, press Y. Enter the new root password, press Return, then repeat the process.

MariaDB will now ask if you want to delete anonymous users. Press Y then press it again when asked if you want to disallow remote login, and a third time to remove the test database. Finally, press Y to reload the tables; a moment later, you’ll be ejected from the setup routine.

Now log in using your new root account. Normally, you’ll be able to do this by simply typing mysql -u root –p. However, if you’re denied access, you might need to update some permissions by entering the following commands on separate lines: 

sudo mysql -u root

use mysql;

update user set plugin=» where User=’root’;

flush privileges;

exit;

It should only be necessary to apply this fix once. Once you’re in, create a database called “owncloud” by entering the following command at the MariaDB prompt:

 

CREATE DATABASE owncloud;

You now need to make sure the root user can access your new database. Type the following and press Return, replacing PASSWORD with the password you created:

GRANT ALL ON *.* to ‘root’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘PASSWORD’;

Type \q and press Return to quit the MariaDB prompt. 

Setting up ownCloud on Windows

At last, it’s time to download and install ownCloud. Switch to Apache’s default web content folder by typing cd /var/www/html; now point your web browser at download.owncloud.org/community and check for the most recent build of ownCloud. At the time of writing, that was 10.4.1, but there may be a newer release by the time you read this.

To download this, enter sudo wget https://download.owncloud.org/community/owncloud-10.4.1.zip, changing the number to the latest version if appropriate. 

Once the file has downloaded, you’ll need to decompress it. First, install the unzip package with sudo apt install unzip -y, then enter sudo unzip -q owncloud-10.4.1.zip (again, changing the version number if required). This extracts the application to a subfolder called “owncloud”; switch to that now (by entering cd owncloud) and create a subfolder within it for your cloud data by entering sudo mkdir data.

Finally, you need to set the appropriate permissions on the “owncloud” folder so it can be accessed and managed via ownCloud. To do this, enter the following two lines at the command prompt:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/owncloud/

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/owncloud/

The ownCloud software is now fully installed… but, if you try to access it in a browser, you’ll just see a listing of its index page. That’s because we also need to install the PHP processor that interprets and renders the code – and before doing this, we need to add another software repository reference to the list of locations that Ubuntu checks when installing apps at the command line. To do all of this, enter each of the following lines in turn:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php 

sudo apt update 

sudo apt install php7.2 php7.2-cli php7.2-fpm php7.2-opcache php7.2-curl php7.2-mbstring php7.2-pgsql php7.2-zip php7.2-xml php7.2-gd php7.2-intl php7.2-mysql

Finally, restart the web server by entering sudo service apache2 restart. Next, open a browser window and point it at localhost/owncloud; you should now be given the ownCloud setup screen. 

All that’s left is a little bit of setup. Enter an admin username and password; these should preferably be different from those you set in MariaDB, as they’ll only be used for logging in to ownCloud. Leave the data folder setting as it is, then in the four boxes below that deal with the database connection, use “root” for the username, your password, “owncloud” as the database name and “localhost” as the host. Click the option to use MySQL/MariaDB, followed by Finish Setup.

The new user account will be created and ownCloud will deliver you to a login screen, where you can use the same username and password as you just specified to log in. As on the Raspberry Pi, you can now access ownCloud via the web from anywhere on your local network, or install the desktop client from owncloud.org/download . If you want to be able to access your cloud remotely, then follow the steps below.

Accessing your cloud remotely

When you first set up ownCloud, it will only be accessible within your local network. If you want to access it from the outside world, you’ll need to configure your router to forward incoming web connections to the computer running your ownCloud server. On our Plusnet router, we achieved this by clicking Settings followed by Port Forwarding, then selecting “HTTP Server (World Wide Web)” from the Game or Service menu, and the name of the computer we want to direct it to from the Device menu. The process may be slightly different on your router, so you might need to dig through the menus. 

Once you’ve done this, you can connect to the computer hosting your ownCloud service by pointing a web browser at the external IP address of your router. However, ownCloud itself will, by default, only accept connections from within your network. To change this, navigate to the ownCloud configuration folder on your server (at /var/www/owncloud/config/) and edit the config.php file. You can do this using the nano text editor by entering this command:

sudo nano config.php

Add the domain you just set up to the trusted_domains section at the top of the file. Press Ctrl+X to quit and press Y when asked if you want to write out the code to the existing file.

You’ll probably also want to sign up with a dynamic IP service, so you can access your ownCloud server by entering a memorable name, rather than a numeric address. There are several dynamic IP services to choose from, but we’ll go with No-IP, which offers a convenient free plan. Sign up at noip.com by providing your email address and a password, and picking a suitable domain name – we chose pcpro.hopto.org. Confirm your email address by clicking the link it sends to your inbox; if you’re using Windows, install the Dynamic Update Client using the provided link, so that it can notify the No-IP servers every time your router’s IP address changes.

If you’re running ownCloud on DietPi, type dietpi-config at the command prompt and press Return to launch the setup tool. Key down to Network Options: Misc and press Return, then key to No-IP and press Return. Select Ok and press Return to set up the service. When it’s finished installing, select the same No-IP option to set it up, then enter the email address and password you used to create your No-IP account. Your domain name will be detected and your IP address will be registered.

The old ways of working don’t work any more. Now that fast broadband is the norm, city-centre offices are an expensive luxury. New starters fully understand the benefits of remote working and are often put off by traditional cultures of “presenteeism”, where bosses demand that staff be physically on site just to keep an eye on them.

That sort of attitude isn’t merely unhelpful – it’s counterproductive. A study by Stanford University’s Nicholas Bloom split 500 staff into two groups: a control group who continued to work from the offices of a Chinese travel agency, and an equal number who worked from home. Bloom observed that those based at home routinely worked longer hours than those in the office, while taking fewer sick days – and they were 50% more likely to stay with the company. At the same time, smaller offices enabled the agency to save $2,000 per head every year.

The challenge that remains is communication. When staff aren’t in the same building, they need ways of communicating as easily as possible. That’s led to a growth of telepresence services and hardware, but until recently the cost has put these out of reach of smaller businesses.

Today, small firms that haven’t been able to invest in telepresence facilities find themselves in an enviable position. There’s a boom in free or low-cost solutions that are resource-light and feature-rich. Open standards are driving increased competition and direct integration, with software and services already in use in businesses around the world. And with no existing investment in proprietary on-site equipment, there is no imperative for small companies to continue with their current solution until it’s been fully depreciated – or until the board can be convinced to sign off on its replacement.

It’s possible to set up telepresence facilities within a small business at no cost, and without a dedicated team to oversee its roll-out and maintenance. For those that decide that a paid-for solution is the best option, meanwhile, the savings made in rent, travel, staff turnover and sickness could well see those costs recouped in short order.

Here are some of the best free and low-cost solutions for bringing a diverse, remote workforce together.

3CX

The most flexible of these solutions are provided by companies for whom messaging and presence are just part of a wider offering. Office and Windows are Microsoft’s cash cows; social networking is how Facebook makes its money. However, 3CX is different. Its core focus is a unified communications system built largely on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which underpins most VoIP applications. Its service can live in the cloud or on-premise, running under Windows or Linux. It can even be hosted on a Raspberry Pi.

3CX’s offering delivers voicemails to inboxes, faxes as PDFs, and lets users see at a glance which colleagues are available. This is more intelligent than it sounds, allowing staff to tag their status with messages like “back at five”, so team members can avoid chasing them when they’re not free.

“Click to Call” extensions for Firefox and Chrome transform phone numbers on web pages into clickable links, which dial out automatically. But perhaps the smartest integration, works in the opposite direction, integrating the company’s website with its back-end systems so staff can chat with web visitors directly, not just by text but also voice or video call.

Pricing is determined not by how many users you want to connect, but the number that needs to connect simultaneously. Keep that number below eight and the standard service is free, after which Pro and Enterprise plans charge on a per-seat, per-month scale, which gets cheaper per user as your company grows. These plans also include features such as call recording, Office 365 integration and up to 250 web conferencing participants.

Jabber 

Cisco’s Jabber communications platform is perfect for a BYOD organisation. It can be installed on all types of consumer hardware, and includes phone integration, videoconferencing and visual voicemail. Participants can even control far-end cameras to show specific parts of the room to which they’re talking, as well as the room in which they’re sitting.

Jabber clients are available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, and in 2019 it underwent a redesign to bring it into line with Cisco Webex Teams. The two are fully integrated, allowing different parts of the firm – and members within a team – to use whichever they prefer, seamlessly.

If the name sounds familiar, the original Jabber protocol – now renamed as the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) – has been a significant player in presence and messaging since the early 2000s, and the technology on which Cisco’s implementation is based is open-source, with all transactions encrypted using industry standard SSL/TLS connections.

Cisco isn’t the only player in this market. Polycom is also building powerful telepresence conferencing products specifically aimed at smaller players. Its RealPresence Desktop Video Conferencing Software provides on-the-fly conferencing tools on a regular PC, saving businesses the capital outlay of equipping meeting rooms with screens and cameras. It incorporates acoustic fencing to isolate participants’ voices, backlight compensation, and simple provisioning for up to 50,000 users at a time. It will also connect to room-based video hardware for teams in which some work remotely and others are office-based.

Slack

Perhaps the best-known business collaboration tool, Slack began life as an internal project for game developer Tiny Speck, which needed an online space where its team could virtually meet to work on a game called Glitch. The game wasn’t a huge hit, but the collaboration tool was so successful that it was spun off as a separate product, and the company renamed itself Slack Technologies. 

Alongside persistent messaging, Slack allows users to share files and participate in video calls, and boasts useful integrations with Google Drive, Trello and more than 150 other services, including Outlook Calendar and OneDrive. A big part of the appeal is that anyone can use it for free – there’s officially no limit to the number of users a business can register without paying a penny. This has helped the platform grow to more than ten million daily active users.

There are a few catches: the free plan only keeps the most recent 10,000 messages, only allows for one-to-one video calls and up to 5GB of storage, and doesn’t have screen-sharing capabilities. Those are enabled in the Standard (£5.25 per user per month) or Plus (£9.75 per user per month) plans, and you can include up to 15 participants on any video call.

A key strength of Slack is the way it minimises digital noise by dividing conversations into separate channels. These can be organised by subject, project, client and so on, and new channels can be opened up for specific issues. As Slack points out, members “can join and leave channels as needed – unlike lengthy email chains”. Integrated direct messaging also helps to keep exchanges focused. 

While most communication will be internal, Slack can also facilitate external collaboration, with team members sharing access to channels with participants outside of the host organisation. Perhaps the most attractive thing about Slack is that it’s a solely software-based solution, with clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. This makes it effectively free to deploy.

Microsoft Teams

Teams is self-evidently positioned as a competitor to Slack; it emerged after Bill Gates and Satya Nadella reportedly nixed a plan to acquire the latter for $8 billion. This was likely a smart move, as Microsoft already owned Skype, which contains much of the technology needed for business communications. Indeed, Microsoft plans to retire Skype for Business in 2021 and replace it with Teams.

The tool brings together multiple core business tools in one interface. VoIP is a given and it’s supplemented by regular telephony, allowing users to dial landline and mobile numbers from within the client. Both public and direct messaging are supported, and hosted meetings can be set up on the fly, with plugins for Outlook allowing meeting administrators to invite other members to participate. Other plugins, known as Connectors, draw in data from third-party services such as Twitter and Mailchimp.

A big attraction of Teams is its close integration with Office and the Office 365 subscription platform. That doesn’t mean you need to be an Office subscriber to use it: the free version is available to anyone. But sign up for free and you’ll get not only the Teams app, with full support for online audio and video calls for up to 300 users, but also access to web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. 

Upgrade to the Office 365 Business Essentials package (£3.80 per user per month) to get web-based Outlook access and scheduled meetings, as well as OneDrive storage. For £9.40 per month, the Business tier includes web and desktop versions of Office applications. Teams is available as a web app, or a locally hosted app on Windows, macOS, Android and iOS.

Workplace from Facebook

Workplace from Facebook started out in a similar way to Slack: originally an in-house product used by staff to discuss projects, it was shared with the public in beta form in 2015, and became an “official” product just over 18 months later. The Royal Bank of Scotland was one of the first big companies to sign up, and it’s now been joined by Starbucks, Spotify and 30,000 other organisations.

For Facebook, Workplace is a logical brand extension. The company already has plenty of experience of bringing users together, helping them share status updates and running a newsfeed. That newsfeed, which sits at the heart of the system, uses AI to make sure users see what it believes are the most important updates, while the people directory is analogous to Facebook’s profiles and Workplace Chat offers a business-focused alternative to Facebook Messenger. There is also automatic content translation and live video (as found in Facebook), along with multi-company collaboration, letting users liaise with suppliers and other contacts outside their corporate workspace.

When you’re using a free account, each member gets 5GB of storage and there’s no limit to the number of staff who can sign up. What’s more, like Slack, Workplace features built-in integration with OneDrive and Google Drive. Microsoft Office isn’t included by default, but these integrations and dozens more are available to paying users. Paid accounts start at $4 per user per month, but the Advanced tier is available to nonprofits and education establishments for free. The Advanced ($4 per user per month) and Enterprise ($8 per user per month) plans also increase video chat participants from 20 to 50, and lift the per-user storage limit to 1TB and unlimited respectively.

And if you’re worried about privacy, Facebook emphasises that Workplace has achieved certification against ISO27001, ISO27018, SCO2, SCO3 and is fully GDPR-compliant. The platform also undergoes an annual security verification audit, and the company pledges that customer data will never be used to serve ads.

Jobs for life are a thing of the past. Staff turnover has never been higher, in part because it suits employers to structure contracts that way – but more often because there’s a skills shortage. Staff are a valuable asset easily lured away by rivals.

And then what? Do you revoke their access, both physical and digital, to keep them away from your infrastructure and data, or should it be business as usual while they work out their notice? A decision like this can only be made if the organisation has a clear picture of what exactly the employee can access.

«You need a complete understanding of the company assets employees use from their first day,» said Fredrik Forslund, one of the part founders of the Blancco Technology Group, whose eponymous product is used by businesses to safely wipe used kit for reuse or sale. «You need an asset management system that tracks the physical assets an employee’s using, which can be simple to organise and incredibly helpful when reconciling assets following an employee’s departure. Besides that, it’s great to know all digital services used, which is easiest to achieve with single sign on. Simple tasks like changing passwords and logging out of online services is an important process that could protect your company from a potential data breach.»

«An IT admin requires quick visibility into the scope of who has access to what within the organisation, including internal systems, cloud services and files,» said Brandon Shopp, VP of product strategy for security, compliance, and tools at SolarWinds, whose access rights manager software helps IT managers understand what a departing staff member had access to, beyond simply their Active Directory account. «Doing this manually is a time-consuming exercise, so having a tool that audits and provides it to you is an important resource. Before the employee exits the organisation, IT admin should revoke access to any information they don’t need to complete their final assignments. Having a product in place to help with this not only provides visibility, but also an audit of changes to your infrastructure to help understand who is making changes and what they are.»

Why, where and when?

It also depends on the circumstances under which the employee is leaving. Redundancy requires a period of consultation, during which restricting an employee’s right to work – and access to resources – may leave an organisation open to legal repercussions. Should an employee voluntarily hand in their notice, however, the situation is somewhat different.
«If the employee is leaving to go to a competitor, it’s still the situation in most cases that once they’ve handed in their notice they’ll probably be leaving that day, so won’t continue to have access to the [company’s] data – although that’s a bit of an outdated concept, to be honest,» Shaun Thomson, CEO of Sandler Training told us. «By the time someone puts their hand up and says they’re leaving, if they want to take that data, they already have it. They’d be silly to wait until the day after they’ve handed in their notice.»

Thomson says organisations should concern themselves with continuation of business at least as much as they think about the safety of their data and the hardware they have loaned an employee. Building multiple contact points for each client, effectively sharing internal data far and wide may, conversely, be the most effective solution.

Hardware and data jurisdiction

«Once the decision about letting someone go has been made, a collection date for assets should be set and when assets are collected, all data should be securely erased with an audit trail… before these assets are transferred to another user,» Forslund said. «There should be zero risk for data leaks in between users in a situation like this.»

Frequently, the distinction between corporate and personal hardware – and corporate and personal data – is blurred. BYOD can result in business-critical data residing on users’ own devices, while personal emails may linger in a corporate inbox. Should employees be allowed to export their mailbox and take their contacts with them?

«Generally, no,» said Forslund. «The personal emails must originate from some other service where access to emails should still exist and remain. If employees are allowed to export their inbox, all locally saved work emails will come along, which is not okay.»

Shopp agrees. «Company email systems and the underlying data stored within belongs to the company, which makes it the company’s discretion to allow the employee to extract any personal items such as contacts and emails before they leave.»

It’s therefore essential that guidelines for the acceptable use of email are written into staff members’ contracts of employment, so that confusion – and conflict – can be avoided at the point of departure.

As Thomson points out, «when you employ people you’re looking for certain things, which you’re disdainful about when they leave. You expect them to come with contacts but don’t want them to leave with any.»

But contacts alone are less important than an established relationship once an organisation reaches a certain size.

«When we’re working with our client companies, we apply an acid test: do your clients have a relationship with you or just one person in your company?» Thomson asked. «If it’s the latter, when that individual moves the client is going to go wherever they go. As you grow – both your own company and a company you’re dealing with externally – it’s more about dealing organisation to organisation. We use Microsoft Dynamics as a CRM, but if our contact at Microsoft left that wouldn’t change: we’d still be using Microsoft software. The bigger a company is, the less likelihood that the employee will be able to take business with them.»

From a leadership point of view, then, and with succession planning in mind, only considering the risk to your data at the point an employee announces they’re leaving is probably too late. Data can be used as an insurance by staff who feel their position to be under threat. By cultivating multiple touch points between your organisation and its clients, this policy will be less effective, and have a less detrimental effect in-house if it was ever deployed.

You’re fired!

Special consideration needs to be given to staff leaving under a cloud, for whom you may wish to curtail access to mission-critical systems and sensitive data in short order.

In this case, SolarWinds’ Security Event Manager «alerts you if someone is still trying to use an account once they’ve been locked out» said Shopp. «It gathers logs that can tell you why someone is trying to authenticate with the account that you’ve shut down. Is it an application that was installed while the person was still at the company, which you need to go in and shut down, or is somebody actually trying to do something that they shouldn’t? Having visibility into that is something that every organisation should have.»

As Thomson explained, though, each situation must be considered on its own merits. There’s a wide choice of safeguards that companies can choose from, depending on their philosophy, size, and the kind of assets – both physical and data-based – they’re dealing with. Key is understanding what staff have access to, and knowing what needs to be done as soon as it becomes clear their time with the business is drawing to a close. After all, the rate of staff turnover is unlikely to slow down any time soon, if ever.

«The way people are communicating has fundamentally changed,» says Sahil Rekhi, MD of RingCentral EMEA (ringcentral.co.uk). «People are mobile and online, and while the smartphone is their preferred communications device, they’re multi-modal. They can switch between the tablet and the desktop – they just want all of their data available everywhere, and social has become a big component of that.»

Mention «social» and it’s easy to reach for Facebook and Twitter, but business social goes beyond that. Platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Cloud and Slack are building a new kind of social: one designed around fundamental business concepts, including collaboration and sharing. It’s an environment in which every form of communication, from landline calling and persistent messaging to presence, can live within one window, alongside directories, databases and files. It’s called unified communications (UC), or unified communications as a service (UCaaS).

As Martin Old, senior product marketing manager for Cisco products at Arkadin (arkadin.com) said, rather than staff necessarily going to work, «work is where they are». A standalone PBX doesn’t cut it anymore.

«The way we communicate on a personal level has crossed over into business communications,» said Bianca Allery, CMO of 3CX. «It’s more about convenience and efficiency. Getting hold of the right person when we need them, knowing when they are available, using chat instead of a phone call. Rather than call my colleague, waiting for them to answer, calling them again… I can send a chat and go back to working on something else until they are able to respond.»

The consumerisation of UC

«Whichever device I’m using, I’ve got the same experience, whether it’s a video call, landline call or instant messaging,» Old explains. «I can do everything from my desktop, tablet or mobile phone – and that’s the experience that Generation Z expects. The experiences we’ve all had with consumer apps have helped accelerate their uptake in business.»

The average employee splits their time between four communication apps, and switches between business tools ten times an hour. «That wastes 32 days a year,» claims Rekhi. «If you could remove that complexity then, as a CIO or head of HR, you could give employees an extra five days paid holiday every year. What kind of impact is that going to have on motivation and employee loyalty?»
This could be UC’s trump card. By reclaiming lost time, staff don’t need to work longer hours to increase output and could be rewarded for buying into an enterprise-wide rollout. Staff buy-in is essential to any large-scale change, after all – particularly one that will impact them every minute of every working day.

«When you’re introducing a communication technology, there’s a high chance it will be touched by every single person in the business,» said Mat Godolphin of Exponential-e (exponential-e.com), a cloud infrastructure provider. «It has to be up 100% of the time because they’ll always know if there’s a fault on the platform.» Contrast that to email, where a few hours’ delay is rarely critical.

Godolphin, who heads up Exponential-e’s UC and collaboration team, sees the always-on, ever-active network as a way of attracting talent. «When I’m hiring for my team, I’m asked about the flexibility we offer and whether the new hire is expected to be in the office five days a week – all of these work-life balance questions. If that flexibility isn’t an in-built part of the culture of the business, it causes problems.»

Reclaiming lost time

How much of your employees’ time is spent in meetings? UC tools could recover much of it, particularly if the meetings would be held off-site.

While Arkadin’s Old is based in Newport, Wales, his peers sit at desks in Argentina, Singapore and France. «We used to live with email, which did the job, but it’s a bit long in the tooth now and laborious when a short message is all that’s required. Organisations developing a modern workplace are looking beyond the desktop experience and the individual – and looking at how their meeting rooms are set up, [as well as] the additional engagements they’re having outside of individual spaces.»

Inexpensive videoconferencing on tablets, phones and desktops is increasingly replacing in-person meetings and helping to reduce friction. A 2017 Polycom global survey (pcpro.link/300poly) suggested that 35% of business professionals made decisions much quicker when on video than via email, IM or phone.

«[UC] makes business communications much more efficient,» said 3CX’s Allery. «With videoconferencing, webinars, presentation sharing and so on, it’s no longer necessary to travel to clients or partners. Imagine travelling all the way from Newcastle to London for a two-hour meeting; it would take up the whole day plus various expenses. Now imagine wrapping up that same task in the same time it takes to hold the meeting.»

So, what should CIOs focus on? «Mobility is key,» Rekhi said. «It’s not only the biggest driver of change, but also a big driver of how you can deliver flexible working and the future workplace. Cloud is key. It’s the only place that’s going to be able to deliver this technology. Big Data and platform analytics continue to be an area of focus and technology players have a responsibility to capture this data. They can use it to make rational decisions based on what they’re saying and understand behavioural aspects of an organisation so it can build the future of work.»

The changing workplace

In many cases, businesses are buying in this expertise rather than developing it in-house, whether contracting third parties to integrate services or by headhunting. Job titles such as head of digital transformation are becoming increasingly common.

Specialists with expertise in UC adoption and no history in a firm may be best-placed to implement the change. «Very often, when we look at which technology is going to drive change, we only look at part of an organisation – a subset or department – where the impact might not be a net positive,» Rekhi warned. «But if you stand back and think about where the organisation is heading over the next five years and what the company’s trying to achieve, you can see that it has a net positive impact. The person driving that change needs to understand the impact and relay the [longer-term] message to staff before they start implementing that change.»

Old’s advice is similar. «Look at where your business wants to be, what the shape of your organisation is, how you want it to operate and the experience your users will have» and, where there’s historical tech already in use, manage that transition.

Done right, it can transform both the workplace and the workspace. «That’s the key idea of UC,» said Godolphin, who quotes Cisco’s «work is something you do, rather than somewhere you go». UC allows staff to work anywhere, on any device, in the way they would if they were collaborating in a fixed location, Godolphin reminded us, picturing an environment of smaller break-out spaces and low-end video devices.

And it goes beyond your company’s staff. «UC can really take the customer experience up to the next level. Not only can customer inquiries be dealt with more efficiently, but it also offers new ways for customers to communicate,» said Allery. «Previously, customers mainly had to rely on calling customer service hotlines and the occasional email that would go unanswered for days. Now they are able to utilise methods of communication such as website live chat, which puts them instantly in contact with an agent and is often more convenient and preferred by customers.»

«I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data in multiple data centres?» wrote Ben Treynor, Google’s VP of engineering. It was 2011, and Treynor was using a Google blog to address an embarrassing glitch. In the process of updating its storage software, the company had wiped 0.02% of its users’ email. That doesn’t sound like much – until you consider how many inboxes Gmail hosts.

The solution was more complex than merely switching to another data centre. As Treynor explained, «to protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs, but restoring data from them takes longer than transferring your requests to another data centre, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.» All told, the restore operation took the best part of four days.

Seven years later, tape remains a mainstay of even the biggest cloud providers’ contingency plans. Should it also be part of yours?

Tape vs cloud

«I’m not saying that tape is always the right place to store all data all the time, [but] it’s the right place to store large amounts of data that you don’t need all the time for long periods of time,» explained Overland-Tandberg’s tape product line director, Peri Grover. «Mission-critical transactional stuff that you need back in a matter of seconds – of course you want that on disk or some other solution, and a lot of people are talking about the cloud.»

She readily agrees that there are advantages to cloud storage, but points to the impracticality of moving large amounts of data between sites. «Amazon Web Services may look inexpensive on the surface,» said Grover, «but when people start checking into it and find out that if they’ve got a 10TB file they need a 40Gbit [connection] to get it across in seconds, [they realise] that’s going to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.»

The transfer rates you get with tape could mean a faster recovery

Eric Bassier, senior director for product management at Quantum, also cites cloud’s relatively low speed as a reason for sticking with tape. With a service such as Amazon Glacier, he said, «its published SOA is hours, and that doesn’t count the time to transmit the data from the data centre to the local application. Your SOA from tape is minutes, versus days from the cloud. If you have tens or hundreds of terabytes of data to retrieve in a true disaster recovery scenario, it can be weeks.»

This is enough to make one of cloud’s key benefits – global availability, 24/7 – a moot point. «With tape, you have got an impressive transfer rate once you’ve got to the first byte of data,» said Carlos Sandoval Castro, worldwide offering manager for tape storage at IBM. «For many companies, it’s much easier to just ship a bunch of cartridges to whatever location so they can get their data back, rather than wait to retrieve it from the cloud.»

Cost analysis

It’s a common assumption that cloud is cheap, with providers routinely demanding mere cents for each gigabyte. Surely tape can’t compete.

Actually, it can, said Bassier. «We’re seeing companies starting to bring datasets and workloads back from the cloud because they’re realising it’s too expensive. When they look at tape or cloud as alternatives for long-term storage, a key factor is the cost of retrieval, which is free using on-premise tape, but can be expensive from the cloud.»

The same is true of disk. «Clifford Group compared the cost of tape-only and disk-only archiving solutions,» Grover explained. «When it took into account cooling and footprint, the cost of the hardware, maintenance, media… the disk solution was six times more expensive than tape, at $15 million versus just $2.4 million.»

Storing your storage media

While it’s starting to hit its limits where areal capacity is concerned, tape still has some way to go – and a multi-year roadmap to prove it. New standards, which are currently under development, are touching capacities of 185TB per cartridge. They’re not yet commercially available, but they have been in existence, in the lab, since 2014.

Increasing tape’s areal density has other benefits. It’s not only the price per gigabyte that’s falling as more data is written to each cartridge; cost of storing the media is falling in sync.

«An LTO 1 cartridge held 200GB compressed,» said Laura Loredo, senior product manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, «but today’s cartridges are 30TB compressed, so people migrate for the benefits of consolidating their data.» She cites freeing up slots in their libraries as one such benefit.

Still worried about the longevity of tape? Each cartridge has a stated working life of three decades

This makes the cartridges stated working life – three decades apiece – somewhat moot but, as Grover explained, that metric is more a means of quantifying their durability than an indication of how they’re used in the real world.

«Tape technology originally developed from consumer cassettes, which had a reputation for not being very robust,» Grover said. «People would leave them on the dash of their car and they’d melt. So, that’s where the 30-year claim came from. The industry had a longevity robustness perception problem to overcome and once LTO came along, all that baggage associated with tape was logically gone but not emotionally gone in some of the old-timer IT guys’ mindsets.»

Security built-in

The removable nature of tape means it’s uniquely protected against security threats that afflict otherwise live storage media. As Grover explains, «it isn’t subject to things like malware, viruses or ransomware the way disk is, simply by nature of the media’s physicality».

Hewlett Packard’s Loredo agrees:

«Tape provides an air gap because it’s offline. If your primary disks get attacked with ransomware, you can go to your tapes and recover your data from there without paying the ransom. It’s the only media that provides proper protection against malware and ransomware.»

But not paying the ransom isn’t the only saving you’d make in such a situation – or in a natural or man-made disaster scenario.

«Downtime can cost as much as $3 million an hour if you’re a credit card company,» said Grover. «You can’t risk that. All you have to do is talk to an IT guy about being down or not being able to get your data back – that’s a hard thing to put a number around. As an IT guy, you don’t lose your job for not backing up the data; you lose it for not being able to get it back.»

At this point, the discussion closes a loop. Keeping the data close to home makes it immediately accessible, which reduces the duration – and thus cost – of any downtime while minimising ongoing overheads.

However, there are other reasons why you might favour tape over online storage.

«Once you start putting your data into a provider’s service, you’re locked in,» said Loredo. «You’ll have to get it all out again before you can move [to another provider]. And when you send your data to a third party you’ve lost control of it. Do you know how secure it is there? With GDPR, you should be concerned about that.»

Grover has similar sentiments. «[Data is] your company’s most valuable asset, and you want to trust that to somebody else? If you want to do it in parallel, that’s great, but they have no interest in your company, don’t reside on any of your campuses… no matter how much you pay them, they’re the ones who have control over when you get your data back and how it gets stored. Are you really good with that?»

Administrative tasks are an inescapable fact of business life, but they’re also the cause of a lot of wasted time and potential. It makes no sense to hire a talented, experienced employee and then have them spend half their days doing menial tasks.

The element of distraction can be destructive too. If workers need to instantly respond to incoming messages and work requests, their work will suffer. Researchers at George Mason University found that even brief distractions can significantly affect the quality of a person’s work. Recent research by Gloria Mark of the University of California found that it takes the average worker 25 minutes to get back to a task from which they’ve been distracted.

Clearly, if your business is to thrive, you need to minimise the amount of time your staff spend dealing with internal administration tasks – and the number of time-wasting distractions. And the answer could be as simple as IFTTT.

Simple automation

Short for If This Then That, IFTTT is a web-based automation platform. You can think of IFTTT as a virtual butler that carries out minor tasks automatically on your behalf without waiting to be told. It’s become very popular thanks to its simplicity, and its ability to inter-operate with a wide range of online consumer services: for example, you can activate pre-configured IFTTT «applets» to automatically download Facebook photos to Google Drive, sync your Alexa to-do list with Wunderlist, or be alerted when the International Space Station passes over your house.

But IFTTT isn’t just for home users. It can also hook into Slack, Trello and a host of other office platforms – which means it can save businesses a great deal of time and effort.

Signing up to IFTTT

IFTTT works by interfacing with services you already use, so to get started you’ll need to set up an IFTTT account and authorise it to access these services on your behalf. You can do this at ifttt.com/join. Don’t worry, you don’t need to stay logged in all the time: once you’ve set up your applets, you can log out and close the browser and they’ll continue to operate. You only need to be logged in to edit applets and create new ones.

Certain applets run completely automatically, responding to external events and triggers such as an incoming email to a specified address. You can also create applets that respond to direct input from you: the easiest way to provide this input is via the IFTTT app, which is free for both Android and iOS.

Below is our rundown of the ten must-have IFTTT applets that will save your business time.

Top 10 IFTTT Applets for Business

Add photos directly to Trello

If you manage team projects with Trello, this applet makes it easy to share captured whiteboards and documents with your colleagues. You’ll need to give it access to your Trello account, then select the board you want to add the photos to. By default, it adds them to a list called «DO Camera», but we’ve created a dedicated list called «Photos». To choose which list to send your images to, click the cog at the top of the IFTTT card and enter it into the List Name box. You can also decide whether to tag other board users, specify where the photo should appear in the list, and add useful metadata such as where the image was shot.

Now to get our photos into IFTTT. The easiest solution is to use a phone widget: open the IFTTT app on your phone and tap your new applet, followed by Widget settings. Tap the Add button to add a dedicated button for this workflow to the main screen. You can call it whatever you like, but we have chosen «Trello photo».

Now, when we want to post an image to Trello, rather than using the regular camera app, we can simply tap the new widget on the phone homescreen and snap away. The photo will be automatically uploaded as soon as we close the widget. You can do the same thing with Slack using the applet at ift.tt/2ogACJg.

Post a reminder to Slack before a calendar event starts

Connect IFTTT to both Google Calendar and your Slack account, and it can remind all participants – including yourself – of upcoming meetings without any manual intervention. Now nobody has an excuse not to be there on time. By default, reminders are sent 15 minutes before the event start time.

Add a task to Todoist whenever you star an email

If you use Gmail, this applet lets you quickly triage email and make a note of messages that need actioning later. Once you grant IFTTT access to both your Google and Todoist accounts, starring a message in your inbox will automatically add a note to your Inbox list on Todoist. If you want to use a different list, create it in Todoist first, then select it from the drop-down on the IFTTT card. You can also set a default priority between one (urgent) and four (it can wait) – but you can’t set these individually, so whichever level you choose will apply to all messages you star.

Send a hands-free voice note on Slack

Running late? Let the whole team know without taking your hands off the steering wheel: this applet lets you use «Okay Google» to post a note to Slack. And, of course, it can be turned to more uses than just informing your colleagues not to expect you. You could use it to quickly assign tasks, or add thoughts to a remote brainstorming session when they occur.

Sync new files added to Dropbox to your Google Drive

Many of us have to share assets across multiple services. This applet makes it easy, by automatically syncing the contents of one into the other. It’s particularly useful if you’ve created a public Dropbox folder to accept incoming files, or your camera automatically syncs to Dropbox over Wi-Fi, as everything is immediately shared with users of both platforms.

Sync Gmail emails with receipts, orders and invoices to Google Spreadsheets

Simplify your accounts by setting up a dedicated Gmail address and asking all staff to email their expenses, receipts, orders and invoices to it before they become due. IFTTT will automatically add each one to a Google Spreadsheet, complete with a link to the first attachment. In this way, your staff can easily submit documentation whenever it suits them, and no-one has to waste time trawling through dozens of emails looking for paperwork.

Track your work hours in Google Calendar

This applet helps staff keep track of the hours they spend in the office, on client sites and elsewhere – valuable information if they bill by the hour. Once the applet is enabled, the IFTTT smartphone app will detect where they are and automatically create an entry on Google Calendar recording their location for that period, for easy billing at the end of the week, month or project.

Schedule daily or weekly recurring Trello cards

Certain jobs keep cropping up, and it’s often helpful to track them on Trello so they don’t get missed. That means someone’s got to keep posting the same card over and over – unless you use this applet. Set up as many jobs as you like, and leave IFTTT to add them to your Trello lists at the appropriate times.

Send live updates from Twitter to Slack

Save time by forwarding one person’s tweets directly to a Slack channel – very handy if someone’s attending a live event, as it allows everyone to stay updated without having to wade through a busy timeline or keep refreshing the Twitter app.

Add hashed tweets to a Google Spreadsheet

Many businesses use Twitter to track what’s being said about their company. Save yourself the chore of manually searching for relevant hashtags with this applet, which automatically searches for tweets containing a specified hashtag and adds up to 15 posts to the Google spreadsheet of your choice.

Image: Shutterstock

Dropbox is one of the web’s most popular cloud services, and has now been around for more than a decade. Since its launch, it’s matured and expanded enormously – but the chances are you’re not using half of its features. There’s no shame
in that – the software does such a good job of fuss-free file synchronisation that you’ve probably never felt the need to pore over the documentation and discover what else it can do.

It’s time to put that right. We’re going to introduce you to some of the most useful tips and tricks that will transform you from a Dropbox novice to a box-smart storage master.

Save space

Save space by choosing which files to sync locally

By default, Dropbox syncs all your files across every computer on which it’s installed. That’s not a problem on a fast PC with a capacious hard disk, but it could bog down a lightweight laptop. To have only certain files and folders sync to a particular computer, open the Dropbox client on that system and navigate through its preferences to the Sync tab. Here, click «Choose folders to sync», and untick the ones you don’t want synchronised to that machine.

Bear in mind that if you disable syncing of a particular folder across all of your computers, the only copy will be the one on Dropbox’s cloud servers. Dropbox makes reasonable efforts to protect your data, but you should never trust your originals to a third party. Make sure you have at least one other copy of every file offline, even if it has to be archived to an external drive or optical disc.

Save bandwidth

While we’re in Preferences, switch to the Bandwidth tab and make sure the LAN sync option is enabled. This will use your local network to synchronise files between neighbouring PCs and Macs that are logged into the same Dropbox account, which means quicker syncing and less tying-up of your internet connection.

You can limit both download and upload rates

If you want to free up more internet bandwidth, adjust the download and upload rates, which by default are set to no limit and an automatic limit respectively.

Specifying a lower cap may allow other web-enabled services to run more smoothly on slower broadband connections. The payoff, naturally, is that your Dropbox folders will take longer to synchronise.

Recover lost files

Dropbox keeps your deleted files for 30 days, so it’s easy to restore

Deleted a file you wish you hadn’t? Dropbox hangs on to deleted files for 30 days. If you need to resurrect one, open up a web browser, log into dropbox.com and click Files in the sidebar, followed by «Deleted files». Click the file you want to recover, then click the Restore button.

From here you can also select «Delete permanently» if you want to remove sensitive files for good. If you want to make sure that the data can’t ever be recovered, you will want to clear the local Dropbox cache on your local computers, too: you can find it at «%HOMEPATH%\Dropbox\.dropbox.cache».

As well as deleted files, Dropbox also keeps track of changed files, and you can roll back to a previous version of an uploaded file if you need to undo any updates. In Windows, right-click over a file in the regular files view and pick «Version History» from the menu to view older versions.

You can restore previous versions of files going 30 days back

As with deleted files, Dropbox keeps track of things for 30 days, so if you’ve made several changes in that time you should see them all stacked up. If your most recent amendment was more than a month ago, though, that’s the only version you’ll see.

Access your Dropbox files on the move

The Dropbox app for Android and iOS lets you browse and view your synchronised files from anywhere. You can also download files directly to your device, meaning you can view and edit them in whatever app you choose to use. If you have made changes, you can normally save your updated file back to Dropbox via the Share menu.

If you’re using an iPhone or iPad, you can also access your cloud files via iOS 11’s Files app. Simply tap Edit above the list of locations and toggle the switch beside Dropbox to add it. Tap Done, then tap on Dropbox, and authenticate by logging in through the Dropbox app.

Once you’re logged in, your Dropbox files will be visible (you can also view files in Google Drive, Box and iCloud). They’ll also sync to the Recents tab – so anything you’ve been editing on another computer will appear at the top of the list on your iOS device, allowing you to quickly pick up and carry on.

Share files more easily

You can actively request files you don’t have access to

You probably already know that you can share files and folders in your Dropbox with other users via the right-click context menu. What you might not know is that you can also actively request files you don’t currently have access to.

To do so, go to dropbox.com/requests and click «Request files». Provide details of what you want to receive and choose a folder in which to save it, then either email the link that Dropbox generates or enter the email addresses of anyone who needs to send you files. None of the senders will be able to see anyone else’s submitted files, so it’s a great way to collect job applications or assignments. When the deadline’s passed, close off the request and disable any further submissions.

Share simpler links

A simple but useful trick: normally when you share a link to a file on Dropbox, the generated link takes the recipient to a screen on which they need to click a second time before the file downloads. Save them a step by changing the «dl=0» on the end of the link to «dl=1»: this means that, when they click the link, the file will download immediately.

Secure your Dropbox account

Your Dropbox may contain all sorts of personal and professional files: you might well want to protect them from prying eyes by adding an extra degree of security to your account. On the Dropbox mobile app, open the app settings, then tap Passcode lock, and supply a four-digit code: in future this code will be required in order to view the contents of your Dropbox. On some devices it’s possible to use a fingerprint instead.

Secure your account by enabling two-step authentication

You should also secure access to your account via the Dropbox site by enabling two-factor authentication. Open dropbox.com/account/security and click the switch beside two-step verification. Provide your existing password and choose whether you want to receive an authorisation code via text message to confirm logins from new devices, or whether you’d prefer to use an authenticator app. If you’re happy to share your number, texts are usually the simplest solution.

The only catch with the text message approach is that if you don’t have your phone handy, you won’t be able to receive an authentication code, so you won’t be able to log in from a new device. To help you avoid this problem, Dropbox also provides a list of one-off backup codes that you should note down in a safe place. If possible, try and memorise one of them, so you can always unlock your account even if you have nothing at all to hand.

Unlink old devices and apps

Another worthwhile security measure is to unlink any devices that haven’t been used for a while from your account. That way, even if someone else is able to get into your old phone or laptop, they won’t be able to rifle through your Dropbox. To do this, go to the Dropbox website, click Security and review your linked devices.

There’s no way to unlink all but the current device automatically, so you’ll need to go through the list of linked devices one by one, clicking the X beside each.

Similarly, there’s no reason to allow old apps that you’re no longer using to have continued access to your Dropbox. Click through to the Connected apps tab and make sure all of the applications you’ve granted access to over the years still really do need authorisation to read, save to and delete from your account. Once again, click the X next to any that should be removed.

Encrypt your uploads

If you want to ensure that no-one else can access your cloud files, consider encrypting your uploads. One easy way to do this is with a tool called Boxcryptor, which is free for personal use if you only want to synchronise between two devices and a single cloud provider – although around 20 providers are supported, including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.

It runs on your PC or Mac (with mobile clients also available for Android and iOS) and creates a virtual Boxcryptor drive on your PC, which is connected to your Dropbox account but automatically encrypts files before uploading them. This way, you can easily choose which files are encrypted and which are uploaded in their native formats, for sharing with others.

However, Boxcryptor isn’t the only encryption option: alternatives include Sookasa and Encrypted Cloud.

Automate Dropbox

You’re probably well aware of IFTTT, the popular online automation tool. But did you know that it has dozens of pre-rolled recipes ready to use with Dropbox? These range from the fairly utilitarian, such as automatically copying Gmail attachments matching certain criteria to your cloud storage, to the more esoteric, such as saving trending GIFs from Giphy.

There are dozens of useful IFTTT recipes for Dropbox

Our favourites include automatically posting all of the photos you drop in a particular Dropbox folder to Facebook, and backing up the images you save to 500px. There are also integrations for linking Dropbox to Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Telegram, Flickr and dozens of other well-known services.

These pre-made workflows usually need just a single click to enable. You also need to give authorisation to access your Dropbox account, and feed in a couple of simple variables such as your email address or Facebook login details. You’ll find the full list of Dropbox tools here.

Edit Dropbox files online

Although Microsoft Office 365 is tied to OneDrive, you can happily use it to work with files in your Dropbox. When you select an Office document in the Dropbox browser view, you’ll be prompted to authorise the Microsoft Office online apps to link to your account. The file will then open in the relevant app and, when you exit, the updated version will be saved back to your Dropbox account. If you’re using the desktop versions of the Office applications then Dropbox also adds useful collaborative capabilities.

Prepare for journeys

The Dropbox mobile app makes it easy to access your files while you’re out and about, but unlike the desktop client, it doesn’t actually sync files to your phone or tablet: all it does is provide links to download them on-the-fly when requested.

To stop getting caught out by patchy signal, make your files available offline

This is fine until you hit a network blackspot. If you know you’re going to be travelling where coverage is patchy, tap the arrow beside each file you’re going to need and tap «Make Available Offline» to download a local copy. Local files will have a small green arrow icon. Check that any files you can’t do without have actually transferred by switching your device to Flight mode and tapping them in the Dropbox app.

Use Dropbox to host a website

Web hosting isn’t expensive, but the cheapest deals often come with limited storage and bandwidth. As an alternative – if you’re not worried about having a custom domain name or using flashy interactive technologies such PHP or WordPress – it’s perfectly possible to host web pages in your Dropbox Public folder.

To do this, simply upload your HTML files into your Public folder, then copy and share the link with whoever needs access. The important part is to remove «?dl=0» from the end of the URL, which makes sure that the page opens up in the browser rather than being downloaded onto the visitor’s machine.

If you want a memorable custom address, check out DropPages, which will either give you a free subdomain or allow you to redirect to your own domain for a fee of £5 a month. Although the DropPages service doesn’t actually serve web content directly from your Dropbox account, you can still use it in exactly the same way: your uploaded files are automatically synced from your Dropbox Public folder to the DropPages server and served from there.

Image: Shutterstock

What’s the one money mistake every failing business makes? It’s not setting the wrong price or paying its staff too little: it’s a failure to understand the various types of debt and debits passing through its books from day one.

When you’re starting out, getting a fix on your accounts is no small task. Well-funded startups hire full-time accountants, but that’s rarely an option for the 5.4 million British businesses employing fewer than nine staff. For them, choosing appropriate software is the best way to go.

But where do you start?

A profit – or loss – analysis

Few companies last long if they’re not turning a profit, but that’s not the whole story. To work out whether your business is viable, you need to separate your fixed and variable costs, the latter of which have a greater impact on your chance of success.

Variable costs, which include postage, tax and manufacturing, increase with every sale. Subtract them from your sale price, then divide your fixed costs by the result to discover how many sales it will take to turn your first profit.

A business with fixed costs (rent, utilities and wages) of £52,500, selling £8.99 books that cost £4.82 to print and post, would need to ship 12,590 copies to break even:

£52,500 / (£8.99 – £4.82) = 12,590

If the market won’t support those sales, the business will need to re-price, cut costs or find a new venture. No amount of playing with its accounts will change that.

“We can only support a business in doing business,” says Chris Wade, VP of product for accountancy software firm Sage. “If a company makes poor choices about what it wants to do or how to go to market, the best solution in the world can’t support them.”

This is where the likes of Sage Accounting and Sage Financials software comes in. These programs are designed to help the business spot where the pain points lie, and identify whether they really are problems at all.

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Speculate to accumulate

Tesla lost more than $4,000 on every car it sold a couple of years ago, but with $4 billion cash on hand, it could keep the production line running. How has it done since then? At first glance, not well. Despite selling just over 100,000 units in 2017, its latest SEC filing showed that its revenues of $11.8 billion delivered a net loss of $2.2 billion.

Divide that by the number of cars it’s sold, and the losses appear to have widened – to $22,000 apiece. So if things aren’t improving, why hasn’t Musk shut Tesla down to focus on flamethrowers full-time?

The answer is that Tesla is about more than just cars, and if you only look at the headline figures you won’t see the whole picture. These figures include one-time costs, such as air-freighting hardware to Jamestown, South Australia, to build Tesla’s 100MW battery array. The array will feed money back into the company over the longer term, financing its ongoing research and vehicle production.

It’s easy to forget that Tesla, founded in 2003, is still a relative startup beside Ford (1903) and Mercedes-Benz (1926), making this the perfect example of a company taking early losses for the sake of longer-term success.

Sales are only for show

It’s tempting to follow Tesla’s lead, keeping prices comparatively low in the hope of generating buzz – but this is a dangerous game. Paper-thin profits don’t leave room for error and don’t build in contingency. Growing your sales feels good, but unless you’re doing it for the right reasons, the figures alone are meaningless.

IBM’s second president, Thomas Watson, is often misquoted as saying there was a global market for “about five computers”. He was actually talking about the 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, rather than computers in general, but the point remains that even on so few sales (it actually took orders for 18), it still made sense for IBM to invest in research and production.

There’s no magic bullet for formulating a sales plan, choosing the right price and attracting customers – and although software can help you monitor what’s happening in your business, it has to be used alongside your business sense.

“Having a system in place gives you that intrinsic visibility into the underlying performance, so you know where the money has gone, where it’s coming from, who your customers are and who owes you money,” says Wade. “All of that means you’re no longer relying on the most unreliable thing: the human brain.”

Profiting from proof

If you’ve cut your costs as far as you can, and can’t sustain losses for as long as Tesla, what next? Raising additional capital is one option, but it’s only open to businesses that can prove they can pay it back.

Tracking your accounts from day one – in software that was designed for the job – gives you an overview of your business performance and lets you project into the future. Both are crucial when pitching for additional funding and deciding how to spend it.

“You can make better decisions more quickly,” says Wade. “We hear about access to capital being a limiting factor to small businesses, but it’s much easier to secure funding if you’ve got a system that helps a financier understand the health of your business at the push of a button.”

Having this information to hand, in Wade’s words, “lets the owner worry about doing business, rather than managing a business”.

The one money mistake all failing businesses make

If all failing businesses have one thing in common, it’s not necessarily that they’re spending more than they’re making. As we said at the outset, it’s a failure to understand the implications of the various debts and debits that pass through its books. If they don’t have the tools they need to identify that imbalance – and understand what it means – it can quickly become an issue.

“It might not be the most fundamental mistake that an entrepreneur makes, but failing to prepare for a future where they need to know these things is preparing to fail for that future,” says Wade. “Systems give a business longevity – and the confidence it needs to take things forward.” 

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