One name – hundreds of user stories. ISL Online. Every month or so we reach out to the ones we value most – our users. We all tell our own unique stories, and this month we have decided to give you something different; our story. The idea arose spontaneously upon reading your stories and seeing just how much we actually have in common. Besides, it’s always good to learn from the masters. 😉

To have four online collaboration products available without limitations can be a big plus in the IT industry, as a matter of fact in any industry. Yet in an international business with disparate teams and location-independent employment like ours this benefit has outgrown into a necessity. The fact is we use all four of our online collaboration products on a daily basis.

Let me start with your favourite remote desktop support product – ISL Light reinforced with ISL Pronto’s live chat easily integrated into a website. Like most software providers, we too offer support for our products. Having customers in more than 100 countries, remote desktop support is the best and in most cases the only way to provide efficient customer support service. Although customers, who need help, reach us through email, telephone, and ‘Live chat’ button on our website, most of them seem to prefer the latter option. Pretty understandable if you consider that it’s easily accessible on the website, costs free, and it only requires one click to upgrade the basic live text chat with ISL Light’s desktop sharing with audio and video exchange.

Having effectively employed user management and custom integrations, our administrator has created separate user groups in ISL Pronto based on location and interest, like Headquarters, Spain, or sales and support. Clients coming in from ‘Live chat’ are routed to an appropriate operator group based on their geographical location. E.g. if a person from Netherlands clicks ‘Live chat’ on www.islonline.com, our Dutch partner will primarily receive a ring and if nobody answers, supporters in the headquarters will get it too.

As I have written on the blog before, ISL Pronto can also be used as an Enterprise instant messenger and has in fact replaced all other consumer instant messengers here at ISL Online. Everybody at ISL Online, remote teams included, stay logged in ISL Pronto during work hours and are thus always available for one-on-one or multiple-user private chats. This way, minor issues and doubts can be simply resolved on the spot, not to mention the extensive improvements in a relationship between employees and remote teams. As Gigaom put it last month, every company with a remote team needs a sort of “watercooler effect” in terms of positive results of the on-the-job socializing. Needless to say, instant messaging proffers as one of the “watercooler” possibilities as it promotes good relations between team members in business and private lives.

The use of ISL AlwaysOn’s remote access is pretty straightforward as it usually involves either remote work or remote computer/server maintenance. Like in many companies, ISL Online staff members can also work from home using the ISL AlwaysOn remote access application. Besides the obvious benefits like flexible work hours, remote access has turned out handy in preventing from spreading diseases as well. Unless forced to a horizontal position, a sick person with a contagious condition normally works from home.

If I left the online meeting app ISL Groop to be the last, it is definitely not because it was in any way inferior to the first three, far from that. It is because I wanted to give it a special attention. The truth of the matter is that the more offices a company has, especially when spread over big distances, the more crucial it is to build regular and personal relations with remote teams. That is why, everybody at ISL Online, let it be in Slovenia, the UK, Luxembourg, Germany, or the USA meet online every week on the same day at the same time, and talk about finished, on-going and future tasks, the weekly progress, concerns, or even holidays. Every person gets its five minutes of fame on the podium with VoIP and video enabled and can talk about anything related to the job or personal life, share slides, and show his/her desktop to present a new feature, video, webpage, or anything else. These weekly meetings aside, the ISL Groop app is mostly used for standard product presentations to potential customers and partners.

I encourage you to contact us if you liked our application of ISL Online products and have no idea where to start to put it up yourself. Have a great weekend!