5G is the next generation of mobile broadband, and it will eventually replace consumers’ and corporations’ 4G LTE connections. With 5G, users will see exponentially faster download and upload speeds, with drastic reductions in latency. This will open up a new world of possibilities, and it’s easy to understand why the technology is the subject of such breathless coverage in the press.

At the moment, the reality of 5G doesn’t match this hype, but that’s only because the infrastructure isn’t in place yet. Most serious industry observers predict that it will take at least a year or two for wireless carriers to build out 5G networks capable of supporting widescale use. But once that infrastructure is in place, it truly will change the world — and businesses should begin preparing today.

ServiceNow recently announced four return-to-work applications focused on helping customers prepare and manage their employees for a safe return to the workplace. From employee readiness surveys to health screening to PPE inventory management and more, these apps and the complimentary management dashboard will help ensure that the workforce transition from home back to the office is seamless and safe.

In its bid to help organizations return to the workplace in a safe manner, ServiceNow is doing what it does best, helping companies manage the complex workflows that are integral part of keeping employees healthy. The ServiceNow Safe Workplace suite is engineered with that in mind.

For many organizations, the ServiceNow Service Portal is the primary way that approvers interact with the records they approve. It is also often a major way that managers, directors and VPs interact with the system when introducing ServiceNow’s functionality to other departments. First impressions matter; providing an optimal user experience right off the bat can go a long way toward long-term adoption within an organization. Here are a few things you may want to do to improve the Portal experience for your approvers.

We at CDW pride ourselves on developing automation tools to make our collaboration deployment engineers’ jobs easier. We have created tools to automate just about everything there is to automate with Cisco on-premises products: Communications Manager, Unity Connections, Contact Center Express/Enterprise and Voice Gateways, to name a few. With the migration to more cloud-based solutions in the collaboration space, and coinciding with our new service of deploying the cloud voice platform RingCentral, it made sense to create an automation tool to quickly provision users and phones.

As countless organizations have raced to shift their employees to a remote work model using solutions such as videoconferencing tools, many have learned an unfortunate lesson about their user devices: throttled by their hard drives, they often struggle to keep up with the demands of latency-sensitive workloads. Fortunately, there’s a simple — and relatively inexpensive — fix. Solid-state drives (SSDs) can not only provide drastic improvements to performance, but also offer a boost to security and durability.

The last time we blogged about this topic, we went into detail about that “one weird trick” for bringing Telepresence into your Webex Event Center meetings and events. While effective, that “trick” involved a complex setup to get there. Fun for geeking out — not as much fun when trying to simplify your virtual event workflow. Event Center now supports joining directly via Cisco Video devices.