Question

Mobile and wireless devices are being increasingly used in the Business Administration and Management Industry.   write a three-page paper that discusses three (3) mobile apps that could be used in business management. How do these apps increase the productivity of business managers and their customers? Are there any drawbacks involved in using these apps?

Your paper should include:

1. A three-page discussion of the problem.

2. A conclusion and list of all academic references used.

Answer 1

With advances in technology and the ever-increasing penetration of the Internet, it has become increasingly difficult for enterprises to respond to complaints from their customers in real-time and to meet their expectations.

It is very important for the business to provide high-quality services in a short time; Multitasking is the way to go, and mobile apps help businesses do the same. With application companies offering customized products, enterprises can now deliver the best results in a highly efficient way. Since there are many Android apps available on the Play Store, business owners are spoiled for choice and get confused about choosing an app that will suit your business needs. To solve this problem, we have prepared a list of commercial Android applications that organizations can use to carry out their daily tasks.

Three (3) mobile apps that could be used in business management are:-
1.Asana:
It was founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder D. Moskovitz and engineer Justin Rosenstein, who both worked on improving the productivity of employees at Facebook. The product launched commercially in the year 2012. Asana helps everyone on your team stay organized and productive. The app allows you to assign tasks to anyone on your team via their email address and includes capabilities to create entire projects with due dates, sub-tasks, and notifications to the emails of relevant employees so that everyone is on the same page. This app will help you stay on top of everything that is going on at your business while you're away while letting you know who on your team might have some bandwidth for a new project.
Key features are:

• Flexible. It is quite flexible as it offers to check latest updates from colleagues, ask questions, write notes, check and adjust task deadlines and statuses, and easily check off my to-do list.
• Cross-platform and integration. Asana syncs across all my devices and has over 100 integration – including Adobe Creative Cloud and Timely.
• All the information about work stays together (as opposed to in convoluted email chains).
• Everyone knows who is responsible for what.
• Everyone knows when things are due.
• There is increased transparency in current progress and what should happen next.
• It also has the capability to merge with your files and systems to make the collaboration less labor-intensive. You can use the online tool to keep track of your to-do lists, eliminate project-update meetings, and set private reminders

Drawbacks:

• Asana is a task management app without integrated Gantt and Time tracking. The app does not support start dates properly and tasks that have sub-tasks could have a totally disconnected start and end dates.
• The UI is really confusing and if you have a lot of projects and members in the project it becomes a huge UX mess.
• One-on-one communication is missing. See below what we have had to resort to for this.

2.Slack

Slack is cloud-based collaboration software. Slack is a proprietary business communication platform developed by American software company Slack Technologies. Slack offers many features, including persistent chat rooms organized by topic, direct messaging and private groups
Slack began as an internal tool for S. Butterfield's company Tiny Speck during the development of Glitch, which is an online game. In August 2013, Slack was officially launched.

Slack integrates with many third-party services and supports community-built integration, including Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, Box, Heroku, IBM Bluemix, Crashlytics, GitHub, Runscope, Zendesk, and Zapier. In December 2015,

Slack provides an application programming interface (API) for users to create applications and automate processes, such as sending notifications based on human input, updating user alerts on specified conditions, Slack's API is highly compatible with many types of applications, frameworks, and services.

Key features are:

• Pinning messages and reference links to various channels: In each channel or direct message, have a capability to pin up to 100 messages, files, or documents, Users find it helpful to pin a message or two for keeping the channel’s purpose at the focus.
• Managing and tracking of documents: Syncing up with file management systems like Google Drive and Dropbox Paper helps cut a ton of back-and-forth from one app to another for busy teams because you can access and discuss files directly in your channels on slack.
• Advanced search modifiers: Like Google search, the search function in Slack helps you find the stuff through its keywords. shared channels across workspaces are used shared channels allow you to connect across Slack work-spaces, creating a direct line of secure communication between one company or organization to another.
• Streamlining your sidebar: sidebar menu offers options to sort channels and direct messages to your specifications. Mark the channels that you need to keep up with regularly and watch those channels ascend to the top of your sidebar, where you’ll never lose sight of them. It offers customizable your sidebar theme.
• Reminders setup : Set up the remainder through the commons /remind to remind about an event, meeting, deadline, message, file.

Drawbacks

• Destructive real-time messaging: click the Do Not Disturb button, and you have the opportunity to set the busy “work” time, and you will have free time, so no information is received. Some participants can get around this if necessary. option. By marking the message as instant, a push notification will send an alert regardless of DND mode. Treat this function as your own, but the problem is real-time access to other users
• Huge Storage: Storage is a huge problem with Slack. Although some services must be paid for in cash, of course, the storage for free tiers is only 10,000 messages. History will not be archived, and all previous messages will be archived or deleted. The other day I wanted to see some of the first messages that we sent Slack to the startup I worked with, and everything was gone.
• Tonnes of new Inboxes: Due to multiple channels, all have multiple inboxes that cause less productivity

3.Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams, simply known as Teams, is a unified communication and collaboration platform that seamlessly combines on-the-job chat, video conferencing, file storage (including file collaboration), and application integration.
The service integrates with Office and for Office 365 customers and has extensions that can be integrated with third-party products. Microsoft is a competitor to services such as Slack.
Various features of Microsoft team are:

• Teams: Teams allow communities, groups, or teams to join through a specific URL or invitation sent by an administrator or team owner. Teams for Education allow administrators and teachers to create special teams for classrooms, professional learning communities (PLCs), staff, and all.
• Channels: Inside the team, participants can set channels. Channels are conversation topics that allow team members to communicate without using email or group SMS (text messaging). Users can respond to images, as well as images, GIFs, and custom memes. The direct messaging facility allows users to send private messages to a specific user, rather than a group of people. Connectors are third-party services that can provide information to the channel. Connectors include MailChimp, Facebook, Twitter, and Bing News.
• Meeting: Meetings can be scheduled or on purpose, and users visiting the channel will be able to see that the meeting is currently underway. Teams also have a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook to invite others to team meetings. It supports thousands of users who can connect through meeting links.

Drawbacks

• the transition from Outlook is Difficult: The best way of transaction for teams is for everyone who is a member of the team, to stop using Outlook entirely (with the exception of external communication). However, since Office 365 is still heavily reliant on Outlook, it becomes a problem.

• confusing structure of files path: The way a file is stored in a command can be quite confusing. Everything that is loaded into the conversation is dumped into the root folder of the channel. If someone tries to organize files and move them to a folder with the correct names, the file links in the conversation are broken.

• Limited flexibility can lead to manual replications: When you start working as a team, you do not have a structure ready from the very beginning. You don’t know which channels you need, you may not know which teams you need to create. It develops over time, what you do. Currently, team-building blocks are not very flexible (you cannot move channels between teams). This sometimes spends time creating manual replication.

Conclusion

Many people do not think of applications as a way to improve their business performance, but, as you can see, applications can be a big help to solve various problems.
Therefore, think about which of these applications will help you deal most effectively with the difficulties that will come in handy on a daily basis, and try to download them first.
Most likely, you will improve your professional life in the shortest possible time.

Reference

1. https://slack.com/intl/en-in/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Teams
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asana_(software)
4. https://buildfire.com/best-business-android-apps-2015/