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Creating A Virtual Office?
Fubar asks: "My small company of 10 employees is considering letting our lease run out on our office space and is thinking about having everyone work from home (or wherever they want). I have been tasked with putting a plan together to provide voice and data connectivity to each employee. What sort of solutions have you implemented?"
I'm considering the following for providing voice service:
+ Order an extra analog line for each employee
+ Reimburse each employee for a second line on their cell phones
+ Host our current phone system in my home office, add a VoIP card and provide an endpoint for each employee
+ Use third-party VoIP hosting service" What options have you used to create a virtual office, and what suggestions would might you give to anyone else attempting to do the same?
+ Order an extra analog line for each employee
+ Reimburse each employee for a second line on their cell phones
+ Host our current phone system in my home office, add a VoIP card and provide an endpoint for each employee
+ Use third-party VoIP hosting service" What options have you used to create a virtual office, and what suggestions would might you give to anyone else attempting to do the same?
I wouldn't do it as many people remote work as goof off work. My experience is at most 25% of the people really work at home, and they are the ones absolutely passionate about what they do. Traits successful to work at home:
If the person can't demonstraight the above at the office, it will only become worse working at home.
So your major question should be are your staff suitable? My guess is some are, and many not. I am going through this with a consultant right now, he shows a low connect time, no results and is precisely a day away from being fired. Be prepared to do this for a lack of performance.
Maybe just downgrade the space to something like a meeting room you can rent a few times a week. As someone who's been working in a virtual office for 3 years I agree, a meeting place is essential.
You should have (in my opinion) at least one physical meeting per week and one phone meeting per day to stay connected to your co-workers.
And you need a different approach to management. If you have a bad boss (as I did) you can get less information and feedback. Out of sight out of mind...
I'm looking forward to getting a desk and co-workers again, at a new job in a month.
I have set up and supported remote sites and home based telecommuting. Listen to my advice, listen very carefully and save your sanity.
If your organization is large enough then it is likely that you will have a few older desktop PCs that have been or are due for replacement during an upgrade cycle. PCs that are inadequate for Microsoft XP and Office2003 are more than powerful enough for many current versions of Linux, especially for the role of server. Also second hand PCs with the required specifications are very cheaply acquired.
1) Find an older PC, at least a PII 300 with 256 MB memory, to set up as a headless ( no display or keyboard ) server and firewall. A simple web based interface ( or even an external hardware push button ) can be used by the local users to start/stop the server and internet connection. All other maintenance should be handled remotely via ssh, webmin and VNC.
2) Install a second NIC or connect the modem directly to the server. Connection to the Internet should be through the server and connection to the Office should be through a VPN on the server. Use a dynamic IP service for each site so you can remotely log on to the local server via ssh.
3) Install a new IDE hard drive in a 3.5" removable rack and tray. The drive should be than big enough for the operating system (Linux of course) and copies of some of the local desktop partitions. A telecommuter can shut down the server and bring in the drive during the day to resync and repair.
4) Install a DHCP demon on the local server to allocate local IP addresses, DNS and gateway settings. If the desktops are network boot capable then install TFTP to remotely boot and use Knoppix via PXE and the network. If the desktop OS is constantly crashing, or is infected by malware, the user can select PXE/network boot via the BIOS, and boot into Knoppix. The user can then be instructed over the phone to enable the ssh server to allow remote scan,repair and reimaging of the desktop partitions. The user can use the Knoppix desktop to continue working with full access to files while the the remote administrator fixes/reimages the drive in the background.( Consider hiring someone who knows how to customise Knoppix or another live Linux system for your setup )
5) Partition the desktops with as small as required C: partition ( or in the case of Linux the root partition ) for software. When software is install, use dd and netcat via live Knoppix to copy/clone a snapshot of the partition to the server. You can allocate the remaining free space as a persistent partition where documents are stored.
6) Install and enable remote VNC service on all the platforms, but only allow incoming connections from the local server ( which is redirected over a SSH tunnel ).
7) For local backup, create share directories on the desktop accessible by the server. On the local server create loopback encrypted file systems, unmount and copy the images to the desktops shares in chunks, using redundancy if enough space is available on the desktops. Checksum ( MD5 is enough ) each piece.
8) If the network load to the Office is taking up all the available internet bandwidth or the connection is just too slow then install proxy servers on the local server. You can also consider using a distributed filesystem ( OpenAFS is still the best ) wi
That software covers a real need, and there's no denying that.
That said, you loose a lot from cutting on the close contact between employees. In that regard, email is better than snail mail, chat is better than email, phone/VoIP is better than chat, video-chat is better than phone and close contact is better than all of them put together.
When considering team work/communication, the information transfer suffers a lot if you don't have close contact. I'm not sure if its the level of comfort you establish with day-to-day contact or trust in team members or whatever else, but I think working remotely only works as a last resort, or just as a short-term solution.
I've worked in an outsourcing company (writing software for some other company with managers on "the other side") and the contact was always somewhat forced, or it tended to become more forced in a few weeks without close contact. I've also been in three or four-way teleconferences with 10 to 20 people on each side in a separate conference room and its the same: there's a slight feeling of ... awkwardness (I guess) that creeps in; conversations are harder to follow, people tent to mute the phone on the other side and chat about something else as long as they don't have something immediate to say and so on ...
In the end, you loose on communication, on the volume of information you transfer and big-time on efficiency (its much more difficult and time and resource consuming to make a phone call/open a chat, than to turn your head to your colleagues and announce "Hey, I locked the sources for XYZ on my machine").
In conclusion, I'd consider working from home as a long term solution only as a last resort.
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)