Working from home during Covid-19

Working from home during Covid-19

The Government have advised workers to work from home wherever possible and there are various solutions that will enable you to work from home seamlessly. The options available to you will depend on your existing telecoms and IT solutions and if you are unsure which way to go, please call our IT support company in Birmingham to discuss the best route for you.

Your telecommunications options:

SIP telephone systems
If you have SIP telephone lines then you can either divert your calls to multiple mobiles or have softphones which is an application installed on either your laptop or mobile enabling you to take calls via a headset.

Hosted telephone systems
If you have a hosted telephone system then you simply have a divert placed on your main or DDI number to a phone of your choice, which takes seconds to enable. Apps are also available to mirror your desk phone on your mobile and work in the same way as being in the office; you can forward calls and transfer calls for instance.

Analogue or ISDN telephone lines
Traditional telephone lines can still be diverted but only the main number although it can take up to 2 hours to implement. Nobody would have predicted this Covid-19 situation but if you are now thinking about future proofing your telecoms, you might want to think about hosted or SIP.

Your IT support options:

VPN
A quick solution would be to set up a Virtual Private Network. After having a piece of software installed on your server to allow remote connections and a quick 10 minute set up on each laptop which requires access, you are pretty much ready to work from home.

Microsoft 365
Lots of companies are already using Office 365 which enables you to access your emails and OneDrive (cloud file storage) from wherever you are in the world.

Team Viewer
Through Team Viewer you are able to view your work PC from any other computer that has the Team Viewer software installed. This would allow you to access your work computer as if you were sitting in front of it.

Microsoft Teams
This is a collaboration chat room style software that would enable you collaborate with colleagues and other external Teams users. You can communicate through text, voice or video with screen sharing, file sharing and the ability to create meetings which would sync to your outlook calendar.

Microsoft have made Teams available to everyone free of charge during the Covid-19 outbreak.

If you don’t think that any of these options would work for you, please give us a call to discuss your requirements in more detail.