While there is so much to choose from in the online and IT world we thought it would help if we narrowed down our top selections as to what we thought offered the most value, flexibility, scale and ability to implement.

Communications and Business Tools

1. Office 365

Your company is only as good as its employees’ ability to work together to accomplish tasks. The business premium license at just over £10 a month has seen an increase in the last year however they do now offer 50mb Mailbox full access to their business applications on 5 devices and 1TB of cloud storage with Onedrive. Share and work anywhere online at any time.

2. RingCentral

For many years, Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions were only built for large, national and international companies. But with tools such as RingCentral, you’ll be able to quickly and easily set up your VoIP tool and gain access to softphone, device applications and whereabouts and systems features such as call routing, faxing, and voicemail. While including more advanced features such as call recording, a unified communications application, and dial-in conferencing at the lowest price levels for calls, and you’re still able to take advantage of higher call quality and call centre features not typically associated with your local telco.

3. ClickMeeting Video Conferencing

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use video conferencing tool, then ClickMeeting is among the best on the market. It offers a free 30-day trial, low-price plan options, and cool collaboration tools such as shared desktops, whiteboarding tools, and in-app private chat. No, you won’t be able to integrate the tool with every social network and you won’t get access to operator-assisted meetings, but it’s got enough to guarantee that your calls are crisp and clear.

4. MailChimp Email Marketing

MailChimp is the most popular and most capable email marketing service regardless of your price level or technological grits. It offers a rich, free plan; lots of third-party integration (much of which is available at the lowest price levels), and it’s got many email templates that help you fire off emails at a rapid clip. You can even take advantage of a decent amount of email analytics to let you know whether or not your messages are falling flat.

5. Elastic Mail

If you require a bit more flexibility than MailChimp allows, then check out Elastic Mail. More of a hybrid of Mailgun and MailChimp with no limit to its marketing database and allows you to send up to 150k mail for free each month. It would be silly not to try it out.

6. Shopify E-Commerce

Yes, Shopify£19.99 at Shopify is the king of all e-commerce platforms. But “best” doesn’t always translate to “best for everyone.” In Shopify’s case, you should be considering this online shopping cart for your web-based storefront regardless of your company’s size. That’s because it requires very little technical expertise to set up, you can try it for free for 30 days, and it provides an abundance of free templates and tools that will make your online business easier to oversee.

7. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of the best social media analytics tools available regardless of your company’s size. However, for SMBs, you’ll love that Sprout Social offers a free 30-day trial, multiple price tiers, and a clean design that makes sorting and discovering data easy.

8. Hootsuite

If you’re more interested in managing your social campaigns than you are in measuring them, then try Hootsuite. This tool scales as you grow by letting you pay for extras (rather than bundling everything into one price package). Hootsuite offers the most comprehensive package of listening, publishing, and third-party integration options for businesses of all sizes.

9. Zoho CRM (and surveys, campaigns add-on’s also supported for great additions)

If you need to gauge how well your sales and product is doing with your clients or if you just want to know what people think of your new ad campaign, then you should look at Zoho CRM and Surveys. Also, Zoho Survey is optimal for SMBs. It has one of the simplest user interfaces (UIs) to manage, offers superb reporting, and is available for about $19 per month. You can also use the free option, which does have some limits.

10. Slack

Even if you’ve never used Slack, you’ve probably heard all about it. This chat-based communications tool is designed for teams of all sizes to communicate with one another throughout the workday. Slack lets users create chat rooms, private chats with small groups, and one-on-one private chats. You can use the tool to share files, have a laugh with animated GIFs, or connect to other tools via plug-and-play integrations, including Twitter and Zapier. We love it here, and my personal favourite tool in the house.

Following our recent announcements of the absorption of DGL all of us at Spotlight hope that you all had a lovely bank holiday, however now it’s over, it means summer is quickly approaching and we are really excited to let you know our next step…

Well if it wasn’t already apparent from the recent site update, Spotlight Studios have now branched into new services that complement our original offering. It’s our hope that we can get closer and help facilitate growth with our existing customers whilst looking to grow the Spotlight brand.

After almost 6 years since the inception of Spotlight, it’s great to say we have been growing and been as successful enough to be able to move into new areas of cloud solutions, consultancy and hosted telephony to see how we can help our clients furthermore with more growth expected to come.

Having already helped several SME’s, Charities and Academics alike to reach their goals, by reducing costs, and optimising their online development and infrastructure with a clear ROI. Spotlight is keen to see what more we can do for customers in terms of helping them to reduce costs, optimise the way they currently work and looking to Spotlight as their digital partner moving into the digital age.

In the past few months Spotlight have now joined with key partners like Microsoft, Spitfire, SAP One, and Symantec to name a few, we carefully selected these vendors and partners to ensure we meet your requirements to the utmost ability, now we can also help guide your strategy for your telephony and IT infrastructure overall or even if you’re simply looking for some advice? Ensuring we are helping to minimise touchpoints across the business with a bespoke package that suits you and your company. Making IT straightforward and simple with a view to achieving your business goals. Please get in touch to understand more at what these partners and Spotlight can do for your business.

Expect to hear us reaching out to our existing clients on the recent changes, further to this and expanding our offering we have also recently hired our new Sales Director – Sean Cook, whom has spent over 10 years selling IT and telephony solutions to Blue Chip Multi-National retailers like Tesco and Kingfisher to name a few while at BT Global Services and having recently worked in the distribution channel for the Small Medium Enterprise market. He should be a fantastic addition to Spotlight and would expect you to hear from him shortly if you haven’t already to introduce himself.

Lastly to our update, we have also extended our reach and relationships in Bristol and South West Region. A further extension to our current offices in Bradford and Manchester we are also extending our reach to Bristol and the south-west, as local to the founders, but more to the fact, we are focused on making a difference in both northern and southern regions of the UK and how now have a presence in both.

With an additional sales focus to become more customer eccentric and to focus on listening to our clients’ needs when moving to the cloud or adopting a new hosted phone or cloud solution. We can consult, implement and roll out with minimal disruption and downtime for your organisation. You may have already invested in this area so we like to ask a few questions as to where we can help?

• Does it work for your business as you’d expect?
• Are you and your business endpoints secure?
• Have you had any security concerns or threats in the past?
• Wondering what Office 365 and hosted telephony can do for my business?
• Are you currently securing people’s mobile devices as well as internet browsing?
• Not sure how to move away from the current on-premise infrastructure with large impacts?
• Feel like you could be getting more business form online?
• We’re you aware that all business in the next 5 years are expected to be online and may only be online?

Let us put you at ease, let Spotlight help you shine, helping to reduce time and overheads and touchpoints among your business. Please get in touch for a chat and book in your consultancy while diaries are open!

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) will be enforced from 25 May 2018. UK organisations that process the personal data of EU residents have only a short time to ensure that they are compliant. The regulation is designed to harmonise data protection law across Europe and make the law more relevant to our digital age.

How does Brexit Affect Us

In short, it doesn’t. Forget about Brexit, we don’t get a “get out of jail free” card. The GDPR does not just apply to businesses in the EU, it applies to any organisation that controls or processes EU data, wherever they are in the world. Our government has already announced that it wants the UK to be “the safest place in the world to go online”. Here’s an overview of some of your new responsibilities:

• Keep a record of data operations and activities
• Carry out a data privacy impact assessment (PIA) for systems and projects
• Consider if you will be required to designate a data protection officer (DPO)
• Notify the supervisory authority of a data breach
• Review data processing processes
• Implement “privacy by design” and “privacy by default”

How can Spotlight Studios help

We have a wide-range of data protection expertise to help you prepare. We can offer consultancy and resources to help you understand these new regulations. Get in touch today to find out more

In one of the most exciting pieces of news in 2017 Spotlight Studios have acquired the web element of DGL Creative. David is a very talented designer and has over 18 years’ experience in the graphic design and web industry. We have had the fortune of working with him over the last 12 months and are delighted to welcome DGL customers over to the Spotlight Studios brand. We are well-positioned as a company to support all their business requirements and take them forward as they grow.

David has been working on his new business Trappd which we’re proud to have been a part of. The business has seen tremendous growth over the last 9 months and he has recently launched his second premises in Northampton. Having had first hand experience at Trappd (Corby) I can highly recommend a visit and it’s definitely the best escape room experience I’ve ever had out of the 4 I’ve been to.

We wish David all the best in his new business venture and look forward to the continued growth of Spotlight Studios.

A malicious new strain of self-replicating ransomware known as Wanna Decryptor / Wannacry / Wcry is disabling computers worldwide and has affected leading organisations such as NHS.