If there is a positive to come from Covid-19 and the lock down period in NZ – from our perspective – it has shown us, that there are other ways to conduct business, that technology has come to the forefront, enabling businesses and their teams to connect and work online.
Covid-19 has forced businesses to shatter their old paradigms and belief systems around how business can be conducted. Before I go on, as a business owner myself, my thoughts do go out to all the business owners who haven’t been able to operate from home – retail, cafes, restaurants, pubs, tourism and the list goes on.
Across our client base, however, we did have clients who could continue to work from home remotely and did so quite successfully. So how was this achieved? Even prior to Covid-19 we were working closely with clients to install, setup and provide solutions that gave our clients more freedom and the ability to work from multiple locations – whether that be the office, the home, the bach or overseas – the idea being to have an untethered connection to the office.
We provided and setup clients with laptops that had built in webcams and speakers, so they were able to conduct Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams and Virtual Room meetings. This really proved the point that you could still convey the same information without hopping in a car or flying halfway around the planet. Indeed productivity goes up when you dont have the travelling time – simply end one online meeting and then click in to the next one.
Clients with fibre installed at home, had a seamless online experience with online video and call quality being reported as very good.
We setup clients with domain names and we provided O365 for Hosted Exchange (email), SharePoint (to access their company data), OneDrive and Teams. During the lockdown those clients reported that it really was just business as usual, that accessing their data was seamless and that things worked from home, just as they would if sitting in their office.
Our clients with VoIP or internet based desktop phones tied to a main number reported that these could be taken away from the office, connected to their home network and the calls continued to come in as usual.
Our Dataworx Cloud backups saved the day a number of times, recovering lost data and allowing our clients to sleep better – knowing that everything was backed up regardless of where staff were located.
So, there you have it, working from home doesn’t need to be difficult and in a lot of cases can be managed very successfully with the right mix of technology. For Brainworx, O365 is critical for making everything run smoothly for your business – from emails to sharing and collaborating on files to online meetings and communications.
Food for thought, as I’m sure a lot of you have taken this time to really reflect on what works and what doesn’t, for your business. If you would like help setting up your home office or providing you with an O365 solution then please don’t hesitate to contact us now, we’d love to help you succeed in working smarter, not harder.