New office job, looking for advice

Ella108

Hi, I recently got an admin/secretarial job, and some things in my office looks archaic, such as phone itself. It does not show caller ID, and I never know who is calling.

My colleague/ person I work with/office owner, does not know tech or have IT skills and does not want to pay too much for IT support, relies on my IT skills ( which needs upgrade too ).

How much would an IT company charge for a small business ( literally 2-3 employees, self employed) ?

Is there a course on Linkedin (preferably as I have subscription currently) I could enrol into to brush my tech skills?

I want to make changes to make my work life smoother starting by changing the landline phone device itself. The office has two computers - laptop and a computer with CPU (???) it takes up so much space. The printer/scanner is inkjet is bit slow and there is fax machine also.

My work involves : Lot of email processing, printing and scanning, and making bookings over the phone, calling and receiving calls, and noting appointments, invoices, billing, etc

Any recommendations, any advice will be useful

Atlantic Dawn

Ideally I'd the company needs to engage the services of an IT consultant to come in and advise what needs to be done to modernise the organisation. There are companies who will offer IT support on a contract basis or on an hourly rate or a combination of both, your organisation is probably too small to justify the large cost of this and it's probably a better idea to uptrain someone within the organisation with the basics, like yourself until you expand in to 10-20 staff.

You don't mention the line of business you are in but if it's looking after sensitive customer information the risk that this would fall in to the wrong hands could cause serious reputational and financial damage to the company. Even if you are just involved in sales you would financial data that would be sensitive.

There are excellent phone solutions available, costs of which are only a fraction of what they would have been a decade ago, here's a company providing various services, there's lots of them around, it could be possible that your existing phone provider may have a business services section that will offer these services.https://www.iptelecom.ie/sme-phone-systems

From your point of view now the minimum I would to that would shore things up at the moment would be...

• Contact the landline provider and see what handsets they support that would display incoming call numbers and additionally allow the transfer of calls around your office.
• You should make out a list of all the software installed on the laptop and computer to check they are running the latest versions of security updates. Getting the latest versions of Microsoft Office applications should help with the tasks you are currently working on.
• You don't mention whether you have a backup solution to your data, consider if the building were to go on fire or equipment stolen/corrupted all your data could be gone. You should implement either daily offside held backups at a minimum or a better solution have cloud backup that is run each day so you can roll back to the most recent backup. You don't mention whether the computers or on a network or standalone, a network would have dedicated shared drives that staff would work from and backups could be made from these.
• A laser printer is probably best solution for the office you are describing, maybe €500 for a basic one that will also support fax and emailing of documents you are scanning in to it. This laser printer for example https://www.amazon.co.uk/HP-LaserJet-M283fdw-Multi-Function-Commercial/dp/B081FGS43D/

Ella108

Thanks for your response and all the helpful advice. I also found out, the owner has different provider for internet, phone and back up and all of which can total up being more expensive compared than having one internet/telecom provider, I think. The owner doesn't like changes .....previous colleague before I joined, made some nice changes to modernise the office but some things still remain same...and the owner is reluctant, old fashioned etc ....I'll see what I can do to improvise the workplace, thanks again for your reply

pgj2015

Why do you need to know who is calling?

Would you not find out once you answer the phone?

Ella108

I think it'll be useful still to know who is calling and may save time I suppose. Also I dont know what other features on phone could be useful! I am still new so learning how to make this workplace efficient

Jim2007

Have you completed your probation period and gotten positive feedback on who you are doing the job so far? I'd imagine that would be a prerequisite in trying to convince someone who does not want to spend money on IT matters to do so.