I woke up on Monday morning with a sudden onset cough and headache. After a quick check of the symptoms on the HSE website I knew there was a chance I’d caught the swine flu. I knew to watch out for the other typical flu symptoms. Luckily enough, as the day passed nothing else developed and I was feeling much better by Tuesday. That got me thinking.
Think about the typical commuter going to work for a moment. They get onto a bus, train or tram with air conditioning. A quick peek into the vents and you’re sure to see something unpleasant. Everyone is packed in tightly breathing on each other. You get to the office and it’s a great place to pass on germs from one person to another, even with all the precautions. There’s the lift, the water cooler, the canteen/kitchen, the computer keyboard & mouse, etc. You then repeat the commute home in that packed public transport.
What if you didn’t need to do all that? What if you could work from home and not spread the germs?
Conveniently enough, that’s how we work at C Infinity using our “Office from Anywhere” solution. What exactly is that? We run a virtualised Microsoft Small Business Server. In the same network we have a Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server. There’s some cool features on there that allow us to run programs on the Terminal Server, e.g. Microsoft Office, etc, and the windows appear on our laptops or PC’s at home. This is all done securely over the Internet via HTTPS/SSL. Combine this with some of the online communications solutions that are available and we can work from anywhere and still work together as a unit. As I type, I’m working on a project with an engineer in Derry, two people in Dublin and I’m in Kildare. We could just as easily be in San Francisco, Dublin, London and Beijing and have the same experience.
The experience is just like using a traditional in-office installation. Microsoft Word is responsive. We can use Exchange, SharePoint and file services. Often the tricky subject is printing but Microsoft EasyPrint fixes that for free and automatically out of the box. I can print anything and anywhere without setting up printers on the Small Business Server as long as I can print to it from my laptop.
So I had a bad cold. By working from home I didn’t pass that on to my co-workers and put our business at risk. I was able to continue working at the same level I always have and without losing anything from the work or collaboration experience.
This is obviously more than just a germ prevention mechanism. We’ve been able to reduce our costs by minimising the amount of office space required. Our staff are happier because they only need to commute for in-person meetings. Their personal travel costs have plummeted. And best of all, everyone seems to be more productive.
On the compliance side, we can work anywhere knowing that our data is in a secure Tier IV data centre. It doesn’t need to roam on our laptops. But even if we need a local copy when we’re out of Internet coverage, we can cope with that. Our Terminal Server’s Windows Explorer can browse our laptop drives to copy files. Using our Laptop Protection package, we can perform online backups and encrypt the data on our laptops. But most importantly of all, we can backup the data on our virtualised Small Business Server, our single data and sharing repository.
This is more than just an SBS installation. It’s managed and running in a reliable and connected data centre. We build upon that with our expertise and managed services, e.g. data backup, monitoring and engineering experience.
Contact us if you’re interested in learning more about how to get this managed remote computing or “Office from Anywhere” solution.
Related posts:
