Operating Your Business Within a Virtual Office

With the impact of COVID-19, we have included some support and guidance to ensure you can continue to operate effectively through remote working.

We have been providing plenty of support and guidance to our clients to ensure they can continue to operate through remote working in recent weeks. We too have faced and achieved our own set of challenges within this period to ensure our business can function remotely, support our clients day to day via our service desk, and enable our teams to keep in touch and continue to work collaboratively.

In this blog, we feature tips on keeping motivated, and how you can stay in touch and remain productive with the help of some great tools. We know there are a number of small businesses out there who won’t have the benefit of a managed service provider (MSP) to support them, so we hope that sharing this will be far reaching to those who might need that little bit of extra help right now.

Wellbeing

First and foremost, stay well! The Government have set out guidelines for Coronavirus to ensure that we are all protecting ourselves and others, but whilst there are restrictions in place, we can still make sure we take the time to exercise, eat well and maintain our mental well-being when working from home. There are plenty of apps available to keep you motivated and help you stay active.

Here at ITRM, we want to stay positive, energised and productive so to keep morale up within our own teams, we have tried to fit in a weekly team activity such as a short fire quiz and virtual team meetings with coffee and cake. It’s great to keep smiling through this so do try it!

Keeping in touch

There are some great options for businesses to keep in touch and operate virtually, and we have covered off a couple below that we use ourselves and know work well.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration tool that helps your team keep in touch and stay organised. Teams will provide you with the ability to hold 1–2–1 or group virtual meetings that you can record and has a chat function to have quick conversations that keep the inbox down — there is also an ability to share files. In all, it’s a simple and straightforward tool to use.

The Teams calendar syncs with your Outlook calendar making it easy to schedule calls. Outlook sends the invite out with a link embedded to join the meeting. It really is as easy as it sounds and it’s a great way to stay productive when working remotely from home.

To use Teams, you will need an Office 365 account with the appropriate Office 365 licence plan, and you can download Teams for free or use Teams on the web here

If you already use Teams, or have heard all about it and you are set to download it, you can access a number of Microsoft Teams videos for training on the tool. This includes an introduction, how you manage meetings, uploading and finding files, and lots more.

Horizon Collaborate

Horizon Collaborate is a cloud-based implementation of Unified Communications (UC) offering flexibility to businesses for the following:

• Instant messaging
• Live presence
• Video calling
• Video conferencing
• Desktop and application sharing

If your organisation has Collaborate then this will support agile working on all devices in all locations, allowing collaborative working between your colleagues and customers, ensuring you are always in contact.

Users can access the Collaborative service from wherever they are located which addresses the need for home working at this current time. There is a guest facility ‘My Room’ which enables non-employees to be invited into an online meeting.

If you are looking to get started with Collaborate then you can access plenty of video tutorials, tips and advice. or refer to this handy guide providing you with a 5-step guide to a complete meeting makeover! ITRM can support you to optimise your communications if your a looking to enhance this in the future with tools such as Collaborate.

Secure file sharing

We know that the security of sharing files is paramount for any organisation and this is still achievable when operating remote working. SharePoint will allow your business to build a secure cloud-based file sharing site to manage content for your business.

Your teams can continue to work cohesively and find information just as quickly and seamlessly when working from home. SharePoint online is hosted by Microsoft and like Teams, you will need to subscribe to an Office 365 plan or to the standalone SharePoint Online service.

Find out more about SharePoint resources and how you can set up Office 365 file storage and sharing.