Remote Working, that's great yes?

We've come to the end of our 2nd full week of remote working with most employees *working* happily from home.

Of note. It appears wine has become the defacto drink away from the office. And I am sure no one is really dressed below the waistline. PJs, joggers and bed-boxers are all the rage!

So, flipping to IT, there have been some interesting challenges.

As we were semi-sensible and carried out a staff equipment survey to determine what people had and how they connected to the internet. We hoped that gave us an idea of what to expect when we sent everyone home en-mass.

Does everyone have fast broadband and WiFi? Great, Tick!

PCs/Laptops with Windows very much after XP... And fairly 'modern', like they have inbuilt WiFi! Super, another Tick!

Great, let’s begin!

Fun Fact #1 Fast broadband is fast until a) all the children are home online together b) there is a national crisis where the entire country has joined your children online and c) everyone is making 1080HD video calls to each other... Your fast broadband is now reminiscent of a late 90s dial-up modem connection and all the memories of the spinning hourglass when moving a 1KB text file around come flooding back to haunt you again.

Fun Fact #2 For remote working there is one clear winner (Citrix knew this eons ago) RDPing aka the remote desktop is a fantastic way to a) save bandwidth (see above) and b) comes with the added benefit your "work" continues working even when you have disconnected - so, that is really good yes? Well, it's only super until you shut your machine down.

Being now as I am first, second and third line support* the morning calls of:

I shut down last night like you said to do (I think I said click the [X] in the bar at the top of the screen but hey lets run with it) and now my connection says it cannot connect to the remote machine, I am on the VPN, can you help?

Yes, for the zillionth time it seems I can help the poor staffer who inadvertently clicked shut down instead of disconnect like you were shown how to do so that you'll be able to connect again in the morning. Choices can be a pain in IT land.

*to ensure business continually the boss (who is very wise, funny, knowledgeable etc. etc.) drew up a list of people (me) who would man the office during this crisis to ensure everything runs smoothly. My team thank him and they have asked me to pass on these thanks when I see him in the office...

We come to the fun of printing... Yup the office printer is "mapped" however, you won't see the printout no matter how many times you send it to the printer... But it's OK I can scan that and email it back to you as a PDF...

BUT *drum roll* the winner in all this is Microsoft Teams, a truly fantastic product that has transformed the way remote and not so remote workers communicate. Even if it comes with a couple of challenges...

Now we've told everyone to launch Teams when they log in so that they get communicating right away. Great huh?

Yeah, no, as we quickly discovered when working remotely Teams is super helpful at telling you the camera and microphone cannot be found as they are at your house and not attached to the office PC to which you are!

Along with calling your laptop several obscenities will not alter this fact nor will calling *us* with no microphone present. I am pretty good with facial expressions, however; I may not fully grasp what it is you may be trying to convey to me :-)

Fun Fact #3 A colleague of mine had the idea we should install Teams on all the laptops we are sending out as it's one less job to do remotely and then everyone could then just click and get on... I have personally thanked him for this.

So, all in all, a good two weeks. I did enjoy this piece of wisdom on preparing for remote working.

How will your existing processes be affected?

You should establish:

Are there any processes that require someone’s physical presence to complete? This includes any processes to maintain your IT infrastructure.?

So, please spare a thought for those in your company’s IT teams who are desperately trying to keep it all going when faced with new challenges by the day and for once everything is stacked against them slightly more than normal!

If you have read this far, I hope you've enjoyed my light-hearted look back over the last two weeks of fun in IT.