It’s definitely cold outside and the Police have now advised against all non-essential travel. Although there’s no-one in the office we’re still open for business as usual. If you have a problem either call our standard office number 01639 326001 or email your support requests to support@tech-wales.co.uk
It’s useful to look at how we’re still working even though there is no-one there. Our VOIP-based phone system diverts all of our inbound calls to our call-answering partners who have a wide range of information about the company and will either respond to callers directlyor take the details and forward the information to the appropriate employee directly via Office 365.
None of our essential services are hosted within the office and we generally access them via the internet when we are in work so this means that there is very little difference doing this from home.
All of the employees are still able to communicate with one another using Lync Server which means we can send instant messages,start voice or video calls and we can even share our desktops with one another when we need to work collaboratively. Of course we already access our emails, calendars, contacts, documents and CRM system from almost any device and with Office 365 we can install the entire office suite on up to 5 devices per user so people can still use it on their home PCs (and Apple Macs).
Of course because most of our services are hosted by Microsoft we’re not all battling with one another to access a single small VPN connection. Broadband lines typically work very well when you are in the office as they are designed to download large volumes of data but only upload small amounts of data. Office 365 is directly connected to the internet so it doesn’t suffer the same problems and there are also two data-centres in the UK and European mainland so the load can be shared between the two.