Homeworking During Coronavirus
The current Coronavirus crisis and the enforced homeworking is making us realise how much things have improved even in the last 2-3 years. Back in 2015, the thought of having so much of the workforce working from home would have sent shivers down the spines of most IT departments. However, now with secure cloud services forming the basis of many organisation’s infrastructure, the concept isn’t as daunting as it once was.
A big part of many organisation’s estate is Microsoft’s suite of Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 making it easy for organisations to keep working. Each platform in the suite seamlessly integrates with the others and the security features means systems can be shared on the internet whilst keeping the data safe. Colleagues can still collaborate through Microsoft Teams using the inbuilt messaging, conferencing and video calls as well as completing most of their day to day tasks on Dynamics 365. File access on SharePoint and OneDrive can be securely managed and enabled for remote workers with different access and permission levels. There’s seamless sign-on across the products it’s not like the bad old days where you needed 3 different passwords and a strict login order. Now, everything is accessed through a browser and it remembers who you are without timing out.
You can even lounge on the sofa, tablet in hand whilst you review that document or conference call with colleagues. Multi-format solutions mean that this ‘just works’ rather than being the horizontal and vertical scrolling nightmare it once was.
It will be interesting to see if this period of enforced working from home with its shorter commute will mean that more people embrace home working in 2021 and beyond.