Boosting Collaboration with Mobile Workspaces

Not that long ago you faced a choice: collaborate or be mobile. To collaborate, you had to be physically near other people so you could speak with them, hear their ideas and share documents. Being mobile meant sacrificing that interaction in order to travel to visit customers, suppliers and remote offices. No more. Today, people must be able to have both collaboration and mobility at the same time — and they can.

Collaboration has never been more important. McKinsey Global Institute estimates that optimizing workflows and increasing collaboration via software-based solutions by even 20 percent can save workers up to 200 hours per year. That time savings translates not only to money saved but also to more productive work being done – and a more competitive business.

Mobility, also, has never been more important. We live in a global economy in which vast quantities of goods are shipped worldwide. It’s possible to travel great distances in a short period of time, making it possible to interact in person with customers, suppliers and colleagues practically anywhere. Powerful mobile devices enable mobile workers to be constantly connected.

Mobile workspaces bring the worlds of collaboration and mobility together. By securely delivering content to any device, anywhere, any time, mobile workspaces provide a portable, always on, always connected working environment that follows employees no matter where they go, on any device, over any network.

Let’s say you represent an industrial equipment manufacturer and are paying a visit to a customer in Europe. The customer is interested in your product, but would like your company to make a small but significant change to the design. If the change can be made, the customer will place a large order. You need to check with your product design team to see if the change is feasible, then you need to contact your manufacturing contractor in Asia to see if the new design can be implemented in the next product run. To do this, you need to share engineering drawings literally around the world. Fortunately, with a mobile workspace solution that includes an enterprise file sync and sharing solution such as Citrix ShareFile and video meeting capabilities, such as those that Citrix GoToMeeting provides, you and your engineering and manufacturing counterparts can access, sync and securely share files while discussing in real time the changes that need to be made…and then making them together. Because you are mobile and yet can still collaborate, you’re able to close the deal in real-time.

Effective collaboration requires fast, reliable performance as well as security. Workspace delivery solutions such as Citrix Workspace Suite, provide all the components necessary for mobile collaboration, and they can exponentially increase your company’s ability to compete in the global economy.