The Gauteng Economic Development Agency (GEDA) has been using the SEVEN Always-On Mail mobility solution since late last year, and according to its IT administrator, Shaun Herbert, it has proved immensely popular with staff.
As a non-profit organisation that does investment consulting for foreign investors and provides consulting services to local businesses that wish to become export ready, GEDA has many staff that are required to be mobile.
"The SEVEN solution includes e-mail, calendar changes, meeting requests, contacts, and global address list access in its functionality, and every function is pushed in a real-time basis, with every action on the handset mirrored on the desktop," says Andrew Dawson, CEO of Dualcoms, which supplies the product.
"The patented tunnelling technology behind SEVEN enables users to deploy the solution without having to install integrated servers and make complicated firewall changes, making it feasible for a non-technical user to benefit almost immediately from its features."
Herbert says this has proven to be an immense bonus for GEDA, as many of its staff are not that technologically clued up, and because SEVEN is simple to use, it is very easy to train people in its operation.
"Ease of use is the key with this sort of solution, while the fact that we did not need any special servers also made it extremely cost-effective," he says.
"GEDA did quite a lot of testing on the various offerings of this sort that are out there, and we got really good responses from the guys that used SEVEN. I think at least part of this was due to the fact that it requires the least amount of training for a user to get up and running."
Herbert says GEDA uses the solution to keep track of support calls, to benefit its overseas travellers, many of whom had previously tried 3G but had experienced problems with connectivity in certain countries.
"The beauty of SEVEN is that as long as there is a functional GPRS network in the country, they are able to access their mail, quickly and easily, and sending a mail is almost as easy as sending an SMS."
"We always have staff out of the office, whether they are travelling locally or internationally, but they nonetheless need to remain in contact with the office and have the ability to receive and answer e-mail. There is no doubt this solution improves our productivity.
"Right now we are only using it for our executives, the people we depend on to always be available, but in the future I hope to see the solution rolled out to other levels of the organisation, so we can give more of our staff the freedom of movement that SEVEN provides us," concludes Herbert.
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