Advisor Technology Q&A: Five Questions From Advisors About The Cloud Answered Hot

 

I probably shouldn’t have mentioned MX pointers. That’s a bit too technical for this audience. In a nutshell, no, you do not need to keep hosting your own server to get mail via Microsoft Office 365. The easiest way to think about it is that Office 365 becomes your new email server. It’s just “in the cloud” and not in your server room. That said, you should plan to engage a tech services firm to do the migration, as there are behind-the-scene changes that must be made, like MX Pointers.

You will have to go through a cloud services firm to get a demo. Schwab is not providing  demos of Portfolio Center Hosted directly to RIAs. It is providing 15-day trials of traditional PortfolioCenter for the desktop. For a 15-day trial. contact Schwab Performance Technologies (800.528.9595 Option 2) or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. As I said in the webinar, I would recommend caution when committing to any Web-App version of software—this goes double for a brand-new one. For the record, I recommend the same caution when a new version of Microsoft Office of Windows comes out. We generally consider the first iteration to be a public beta test.  

No.  The user experience is very different. Junxure Cloud is best for smaller firms and Junxure on premise is better for larger firms. There will be functionality within Junxure Cloud to create and save Document Templates within the system.  These templates can be used with the Junxure Correspondence Wizard (which is the tool that will be used to create Mail Merge Letters, Mass Emails, and Mailing Labels).  When creating these templates, users will not be using MS Word.  Junxure has an online word processor that will be used to create the document.  Those templates can be exported to Word. For those that already use Junxure and have Document Templates saved into Word, those too will be moved to the online word processor. At this time, Junxure Cloud will not be compatible with Office 365. However, that is something that they are likely to be looking into. 

Not sure how technical you want to get here. Whether you’re looking at public or private cloud, however, migration is not difficult for a tech services firm. Migrating email to the cloud from Outlook is easier than migrating an email server, like Exchange, but regardless—it is well within the ken of most tech services firms.

Yes. Assuming your licensing is up to date we can move your current installation to a cloud server. This is really the nuts and bolts of private and virtual private cloud: Take your existing infrastructure and the way you’ve always worked, and get it out of your office so you don’t have to buy/install/maintain the equipment and can access it from anywhere.