In this modern world of work from anywhere, the need for a corporate standardized laptop or desktop has waned in a big way. Given the impact of hardware availability, location of your workforce, and the adoption of cloud based computing, the power hungry laptop has become a thing of the past and been replaced by the “dumb terminal” with a simple web browser. In recent discussions with our customers about what their normal users do with their computer needs on a day to day basis, here are the main use cases:
1. Document creation and editing
Unless you are the creative individual on your company’s marketing team (which in all of our customers surveyed was an outsourced to a 3rd party anyway) most of the documents created are presentations and spreadsheets. We were not surprised how much data analysis people were doing on market conditions and sales figures. The analysis and summarization of these types of data make their way into a presentation for senior leadership. That said, any cloud based office product will do such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspaces, Apple iCloud, and OpenOffice. These products will run on any modern day computer or tablet with limited memory and cpu. The killer feature in these use cases are the massive monitors connected to them for the analysis and document creation activities.
2. Communications (email, virtual meetings and chat)
Email and chat based communications are the foundation of how we communicate to fellow coworkers. Whether it is the immediate forms of communications such as slack, teams or zoom, or the not so immediate forms such as email, the good news is these are light weight apps that run on all modern day computers and tablets.
3. Personal Use
Not that any business owner would immediately think of personal use applications like social media and simple web browsing in fact, they should care and care a lot. Many employees will take time during their most productive day to check in on their social media accounts, look at news feeds, check weather and do personal research. Allowing your employee to do this is essential to maintain productivity and a state of perception. Not only will they do this for personal reasons, but it is also necessary for reasons such as recruiting and researching partner businesses.
Since the majority of the use cases discussed here are light in computing with most if not all docs stored in the cloud, the requirements really is access to a simple computer at all times. If the primary computer is damaged or non-useful to the employee, a tablet can be used as a backup. We are able to provide recommendations to a computing platform that is easily accessible, cost-effective and always available to your teams alongside an elegant backup solution.