Virtual Offices

[Mercutio]

I'm about to make a proposal for changing the way my company works from having a large suite of offices and classrooms to a single storefront containing one large classroom and one much smaller one. I figure we can maintain a space for printers, perhaps a corporate fax line and as a mail drop and otherwise move to working from our homes or some other useful space.

We're still engaged in a legal disagreement with our landlord, but there's an expectation that it will be resolved sometime this spring. We all know we need to move elsewhere and the simple fact is that our lease is the biggest single expense for our organization.

I have a solid setup for private network access already in place. Everyone in my office can already access file servers and printers. Our email setup is Google Apps, which we can all get to from our fancy phones if nothing else.

The only things that really need to be settled are phone communication (I'm thinking I'd set something up with Vocalocity) and actually finding a suitable space.

I have customers who allow a certain amount of telecommuting, but nobody that's ditched their office space entirely. I'd be interested in knowing if anybody has any experiences along those lines, or supports anyone who is doing it.

 

[ddrueding]

One of my clients has migrated essentially to a work-from-home arrangement. They still keep their office, but no one is ever there. The combination of GMail-based e-mail, remote desktop to their workstation, phone forwarding to their cell, and faxes delivered as PDFs to a folder on a share mean no one bothers to come in.

I've found that RDC is more resilient than normal VPN for most office applications. Many network applications don't like the longer latency or they try to shove large files in their entirety to the workstation (Quickbooks). There is also the notion that keeping the data on machines that are locked in a building are more secure, and backups are easier to take if you know that no one has data on their home machine (that they copied there to fix the performance issues of the VPN). The only application I've found that doesn't like RDC is the AXIS security camera tool (streaming video, go figure) and YouTube (a Good Thing).

I might consider eFax, unless you can set up your own fax-email gateway somehow. I see Vocalocity has paperless fax services. VoIP is a no-brainer of course.

 

[time]

Every business is different, but I think IT departments tend to be out of touch with what users actually need these days. You really need to test real-life usability with *all* your users.

For example, Remote Desktop / Terminal Services / Citrix is fine for text-based documents, but terrible to unusable with graphics-heavy documents. I'm sure it's quite reasonable across a 1 Gb/s link, but remote control is limited by both latency and the the upstream bandwidth at the host.

I'm finding a surprisingly high proportion of graphics-heavy Excel and Word files, let alone Powerpoint, PDF and Photoshop (including Elements). You can't work with these productively through RDP.

Personally, I'm pushing synchronized distributed data stores, in my case through the cloud because a) I don't want the support-intensive infrastructure involved in direct access such as Sharepoint, and b) it takes care of several other IT functions at the same time.

This also has the benefit of better supporting laptops on the road or internationally, where you can't rely on constant 3G/WiFi availability.

Having said that, I just discovered two 200MB spreadsheets that are critical to a client and would really suck to have to be synchronized all the time. The reason for the size however, is that they've fallen foul of the Powerpoint trap - the embedded images haven't been scaled down and Excel is too stupid to do it for them.

Databases apps either need to be designed for high-latency networks or you're looking at RDP.

 

[Mercutio]

In theory, it's pretty trivial to move databases, especially those built with Microsoft tools in the first place, into MSSQL and some sort of asp.net front end. I've seen those sorts of things developed very quickly.

I'd like to lobby for more use of Google Docs et al but realistically everyone else I'm dealing with wants to use Microsoft and only Microsoft. I actually work pretty hard to steer my co-workers away from Sharepoint, just knowing that it's very difficult to extract things from it once an organization starts down that path.

But no one in my organization except me actually even needs RDP, except perhaps to test something using a different version of MS Office, or to look at some different version of Windows while we're making documentation. My co-workers do actually use the collaboration features in Word, but none of the files they deal with are actually THAT big or legitimately even need that much collaboration. Basically someone gets assigned the work of writing a manual and that person is the only one who ever actually changes the content of that file.

I figure that as long as I have some kind of equipment rack with an internet connection, everything everyone really needs to do will be just a tunnel away.

The phone system still seems like it's the greatest potential weakness in this. That and trying to convince people to try doing things a different way.

 

[Chewy509]

Merc,
Regarding the phone situation, would a VOIP system work, like asterisk with the soft phone option? (Soft phone client on the desktop connects to the PBX/Gateway via VPN tunnel). The only requirement is enough bandwidth to handle voice...

 

[Mercutio]

That's the thing I need to figure out.

 

[Sol]

Hosted PBX is probably a better option for the scenario you describe than setting up your own.

PBX's are not fun to configure and if you set it up you'll get blamed for everything. If people are working from home or from a small office then you're probably going to be dealing with consumer grade NAT routers. PBXs and NAT routers are not friends and you'd probably have to add a Session Border Control server to the mix to sort out the resulting chaos (Or, more likely, silence).

You probably could use something like Asterisk or FreeSwitch (or even Microsoft Lync if you're forced to use MS stuff) but I think it would be a fairly substantial amount of work and these things never seem to be as set and forget as you'd expect.

(Full disclosure I write software that some of these hosted PBX companies might use so I'm not entirely unbiased.).

 

[Mercutio]

I deal with a couple Avaya systems that regularly make me want to strangle someone. PBXes are not my favorite thing.

 

[Sol]

I deal with a couple Avaya systems that regularly make me want to strangle someone. PBXes are not my favorite thing.

If you just spent a little more time with them, that someone could be you...