Contents

• Introduction
• How it’ll look in your office
• Free Lunch?
• The VyPRESS Approach for Instant Messaging
• Instant productivity from instant messaging

Instant Messaging, Conferencing and Presence Solutions for Small-to-Medium Businesses

Enhance your office operations with the most modern, inexpensive and easy to deploy collaboration software on the market today…

Setting up an office network is a common step in today’s offices, and it’s important to understand that it needs to be the very first task completed to ensure your success as a business. You may have originally set up the network to provide access for document sharing across the whole office, or for easy every day backup or even to work together utilizing your state-of-the-art industry software. So you have solved this initial issue with no problems, right? But what about everyday communication? That’s where VyPRESS comes in. Now, you can take advantage of the many benefits of connecting your business computers into a user-friendly network that facilitates real-time, lightning-fast communication and via-network meetings without having to leave your workstation! This document provides an overview of the many great benefits, possible underlying problems, and potential ROI for deploying instant messaging, chatting and presence software designed by VyPRESS Research for small-to-medium-sized businesses and other types of local and home computer networks.

How it’ll look in your office

So, what does this software look like and what it can do for you? It’s simple. It is a fast and elegant piece of software that runs in the background on every (or on all needed) computer in your office. It starts fast, is practically invisible and requires no special attention. However, when you want to ask John Doe about today’s special price for a client, you don’t have to call the John by phone or even pay a visit to his office. Just click on the program and type “John, do we have a discount for Richardson Industries?” After you typed the message, John will immediately see it in a pop-up window on his computer, and can easily reply to your request even if he is busy with another client on the telephone (thanks to your network, that line is always available). John even can attach a document to his response with a complete list of today’s prices or earlier purchases from Richardson Industries. VyPRESS gives you a convenient workaround for small questions, and in addition, you don’t need to wait for your co-workers to finish their calls, you don’t need to use your phone, you don’t have to dig through “Network Neighborhoods” (or “My Network Places”) for a document, and finally, you don’t have to do anything more than let your network work for you! VyPRESS is fast, inconspicuous, and incredibly user-friendly… VyPRESS is instant messaging that works for your business.

Have you ever needed to discuss a new product idea with several of your managers or wanted to have a brainstorming session with a few of your coworkers? Instead of walking around the office to speak with each person individually, take notes, and make heads or tails of it all later or go through the hassle of scheduling a meeting or conference, and spending several hours talking face-to-face, you can let VyPRESS do the work for you. Simply use the “chat” function to invite your co-workers into a meeting over the network and everyone can discuss the issues while completing other tasks from the comfort of their workstations.

The main disadvantages of the traditional methods of office communication, including phone conferencing and e-mail survey, are inconvenience, and the waste of time and money. For your typical meeting, you need to pay your staff for at least one hour (frequently for a whole business day), you will need to schedule and possibly pay for a meeting room, pay for refreshments or lunch, announce the meeting time, and then somehow entice all of your employees to be there on time. Once in your meeting, you spend all day dealing with issues that may not have anything to do with particular departments or employees, so again, you’re wasting their work time and your money. With our solution you may easily work around these problems and ensure better productivity. With our automatic login feature, all needed employees are available immediately using our text-based multi-person chat feature.

Finalizing with the VyPRESS presence control feature: our software can help you easily and automatically track when an employee switched on his computer, whether or not he/she is available right now at his/her work space, whether he/she is on a call right now (perfect for call scheduling by a receptionist) or busy with current project. In other words, this is a fully automatic, transparent and non-obstructive replacement for traditional time scheduling and jobs tracking methods.

Free Lunch?

You may wonder why not just use a free consumer Instant Messaging system from the Internet (like ICQ or Yahoo Messenger) or a small freeware program found somewhere on the web? There are many reasons to not do so, including security threats, non-compliance with industry regulations, etc. The most important reasons not to deploy a free instant messaging system throughout your office network are described in our article about Enterprise Instant Messaging Solutions.

Cite

There are about 60 published IM vulnerabilities, according to Eric Chien, chief researcher at Symantec Security Response in Dublin. Those range from security holes that could be used to crash IM clients in denial-of-service attacks, to those which allow attackers to install and run malicious code remotely on computers running the vulnerable IM clients.

Paul Roberts, Instant messaging worms pose growing threat, ComputerWeekly

However, small and medium-sized businesses have additional reasons to not allow such “free offers” to be integrated into their office networks:

• Small businesses frequently have no professional network administrators that can carefully deploy consumer Internet IMs and configure firewalls to avoid security threats.
• An Internet Instant Messenger will require a permanent Internet connection for all active users, So as a result, you will be faced with increased Internet usage and charges.
• Free products have no technical support (at least free support), so you may be faced with long-time troubleshooting and installation issues.
• A technology entrepreneur who offers a freeware program somewhere on the ‘Net may well lose interest in further developing the freeware and you’ll be faced with a new search, deployment and migration.

Buying inexpensive instant messaging software, such as VyPRESS, is not only a good investment, but also it leads to savings over existing “free” alternatives and savings of time and money in the workplace.

The VyPRESS Approach for Instant Messaging

VyPRESS offers two programs, completely different in both ideology and user interface to cover all customers’ preferences. Vypress Messenger and Vypress Chat share several common principles:

• These programs are serverless: So you’ll need no dedicated server, no server installation and no dependence for your critical communications.
• These programs and very easy to setup
  and configure: Both of these programs were carefully tested with real users and, typically, gain users’ approval immediately after installation.
• These programs try to work, even with
  poorly-configured networks: We have a vast amount of experience with small businesses and home networks and have made our programs as fail-safe and disaster-recoverable as possible.

The difference in ideologies between the Messenger and Chat are understandable from the products’ names: Vypress Messenger is oriented to deal with messages — it allows the sending of a message with attached files to one or several recipients and to immediately receive a response. It has comprehensive message archiving and searching features, includes self-assumed user groups and Windows domains support, and it even allows you to send a message to a remote office over a VPN connection or the Internet. Vypress Chat is easier to deploy, and includes multipoint text conferencing with an interface similar to web-chats and IRC. However, it is limited to the office network and can’t be used over a WAN or VPN; it also has no support for different groups and can’t send a file simultaneously to several users.

Below we offer you a side-by-side comparison of our products:

VyPRESS meets all of your intra-office communication needs… if you need multi-point text conferencing and the easiest possible installation — Vypress Chat is your product of choice. Otherwise, the messaging and archiving features of Vypress Messenger is what you need to bring efficiency back into your workplace. If you are still unsure which is the best for you, we encourage you to try both and select the one that suits your needs the best.

Instant productivity from instant messaging

In just a few short minutes, you can download your FREE trial copies of Vypress Chat or Vypress Messenger; install them on a couple of computers in your office network (in same subnet if you are going with Vypress Chat), and see VyPRESS's award-winning features for yourself. Once you try our instant messaging software in your office, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it!