Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow – as long as you have a “Snow Plan”

I follow @Mcallistersrcvy on Twitter, mainly because their MD @markamcallister and the rest of the team provide excellent real time updates on road and traffic issues around Surrey and Hampshire.

This week Mark and the team have been providing #SurreySnow updates and according to their latest tweets, and I quote “Models today continue with cold suggestions. Next Fri & Sat poss 20 inches of snow & max temps of -4 deg c” there is the potential for some serious snow and the conditions could be worse than we saw in December 2010.

My new year’s business wish was for a fast start for 2012, January has been excellent but we want to keep it going in February and the last thing I think any business needs right now is the chaos that the cold, fluffy, white stuff seems to bring to our lives.

So last year we invested in technology that enables us to work wherever we want to, no matter what snow or erupting volcanoes want to throw at us.

I am not going to bore you with the full details but obviously I have my smartphone (A Nokia Lumia 800, running Windows 7.5) and my laptop, a 3G data connection, my critical business applications are run by Microsoft Office 365 (email, video & voice conferencing and collaborative working through Sharepoint) and all my customer details are hosted with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

This means that whatever I want to do I can get full access on both my phone and laptop to whatever I need, and more than that our entire team of 7 people can access all the same documents and details from wherever they are too.

If the snow comes we will hold our sales meeting via Lync (the conferencing and instant messaging part of Office 365), we will be able to share our sales forecast in Excel on everyone’s device of choice at the same time and any one of us can edit it accordingly, once we are done we can save it to Sharepoint ready for the week after.

Now I am sure there are many of you that can already do the same via a number of different systems and set ups, but there will also be a huge number of your clients, business partners, family and friends who cannot.

We would like to help these people, all you have to do is put us in touch.