Mobile Workforce? Get the Most Out of Your Tablet Initiative

Surely, you have seen workers across a wide variety of industries and businesses using tablets to perform their jobs. The technology has been especially helpful—and productive—for the mobile workforce, with employees enjoying unprecedented convenience, communication, presentation capabilities, and customer service tools. Customers are noticing, as well—for example, a question that might have taken a half-hour to be answered at a store’s front desk can now be resolved with a few swipes on a mobile employee’s iPad or Surface. And this technological trend appears as if it will continue throughout the coming months: A Piper Jaffray survey found that 50 percent of interviewed CIOs plan to purchase iPads for their organizations’ business use in the coming year.

However, tablets for a mobile workforce won’t be effective without the best applications to maximize your employees’ efficiency. Solutions are available to streamline file delivery, improve training efforts, encourage collaboration, and promote ease of use. Here are some ways such platforms allow businesses to get the most of their tablet initiatives for the mobile workforce:

Efficient Content Delivery

A great benefit of tablets for the mobile workforce is the ability to receive files from co-workers, managers, and the home office. Some cloud-based file-sharing applications, such as Box or Dropbox, allow this, but the execution on tablets is far from perfect. The average mobile employee doesn’t require access to every document in the company’s database, but often, that’s exactly what workers are faced with: digging through dozens of directories and hundreds or thousands of files on a device not quite designed to facilitate such a search. The process is inefficient, to say the least. Dedicated, tablet-based content delivery solutions eliminate this morass by enabling managers and execs to send only the files their mobile workforce needs. Employees in the field or on the floor simply turn on their iPads or Surfaces to easily find the documents to help them excel at their jobs.

Push, Pull, and Updates

The aforementioned content delivery solutions make the process of pushing and pulling files to and from tablets incredibly easy. Drag-and-drop functionality allows for documents to be easily sent back and forth. If a file must be updated or revised, the changes can be made and instantly delivered to the mobile workforce. Cloud-based apps face version control issues—users might not be sure if they have the most recent update of a document on their devices. Dedicated solutions place the right file on the right users’ tablets.

Automatic Sync

Updated files on a tablet is one thing, actually syncing those tablets is another. Today’s content delivery solutions don’t require a constant Wi-Fi connection for files to arrive on the mobile workforce’s devices. Furthermore, tablets don’t have to be manually synced to receive those updates, either (it’s a lot of plugging and unplugging when dozens of tablets are involved). An exec at corporate designates a file to be sent, and it’s automatically delivered to the iPad or Surface, even if the device is asleep.

Compressed Video

Perhaps the greatest advantage a dedicated content delivery platform can provide is video compression. Video files are enormous and take up a swath of storage on the average iPad. Downloading these files eats up space and takes too much time; streaming the video requires bandwidth and can be plagued by obnoxious buffering issues. Tablet-based solutions compress video to a fraction of their original size, thus enabling mobile workers to view the files anytime and anywhere they need to do so.

How would tablets help your mobile workforce?