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?

Comments

Re:Options?

[DieNadel]

We actually have a solution that works like a charm: our bug-tracking and development-request system shows all the tasks that are the responsibility of a developer, and it counts down the days to each task's expiration date.

When the expiration date is 10 business days away, the task becomes yellow colored. 5 days away, and it becomes red. 2 days, and you'll find it black colored. With this setting, it's really easy for our manager to visually check how the group is performing (we have groups ranging from 5 to 30 developers).

If you miss the deadline to often, your manager calls you up and sets a meeting to question your performance. Perform too poorly, and you're history :-)

It looks simple, and it is. The developer can do whatever s/he wants, we really don't care, as long as her/his tasks are being dealt with AND our QA team isn't finding too many bugs on her/his implementations and fixes.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, we use (argh) Lotus Notes for task control.