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Work remotely, with the right software

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WFH has spiked, relying heavily on software as the portal to workplaces and colleagues. Lets look at what suite of software works best for you and your organisation to ensure you remain top of your game…

With a recent spike in organisations encouraging remote working amid the concerns over the Coronavirus, we’re seeing some collaborative software increase its demand by up to 500% as more people opt to work from home.

The benefits to conducting business remotely stretches beyond reducing the spread of a viral outbreak, but allows for better time management by lowering the level of interruptions you would often find in a shared office or work site, and helps reclaim 1–2 hours of your day by removing the need to commute.

Whether you have opted to work from your bed, coffee shop or other location outside the realms of the norm, here are a few useful tips and features that you may have overlooked when previously using your organisations remote collaboration software of choice!

Microsoft Teams - Application integration

A fairly recent addition to the Microsoft suite is Microsoft Teams; poised to eventually take over the reins from Skype for Business with a whole stack of extra goodies to offer.

In the words of Microsoft — Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. The offering ‘Application Integration’ is really where you’ll reap rewards that stretch further than many colab’ software.

Perhaps conventionally you use PowerPoint, Word, Excel etc on the day-to-day; walking over to your colleague for feedback or advice if required, but remote work becomes a hurdle with this sort of light interactions. The solution can be found in the internal app or ‘tab’ store, where these applications can be added to your teams chat window for discussion, all while being less intrusive than a call or direct meeting would be.

The expanse of the add-ons within Teams deserves its own article, but with the time saved on your commute I would advise spending some exploring whats on offer, and what’s relevant for your organisation.

Zoom, simplicity for the extroverted organisation

With most well established organisations utilising the Microsoft suite, I find startups, agile aficionados and sales teams sway towards Zoom.

Zoom offers communications software that combines video conferencing, online meetings, chat, and mobile collaboration — and thats really it!

The user interface is synonymous with Google’s clean and clear look, aiming to be less of a Swiss army knife and more of Swiss watch; functionally simple, yet aesthetically pleasing.

Zoom is perfect for those organisations that speak to customers and other stakeholders outside of their company network. The reason for this is not overly mind-blowing; its simply a generated link that can be dropped in an email and be ready for the call to take the recipient into a clean interface, ready for your meeting. That said, Teams and many other collaborative comms has the exact same function, but where Zoom excels is its total dedication to simplicity, with only two clicks your meeting is ready. Other comparator software needs a little more setup to get a meeting rolling, and the attendees notified.

Don’t forget to make your life even easier with an Outlook plugin that generates the link for you, and drops its straight into your outbound email.

Microsoft To Do, plan your day

I like to be as diverse as possible with my software recommendations but let’s face it, Microsoft know what they’re doing with Cloud software.

Microsoft To-Do is totally embedded into my home and business life, allowing me to unload the messy notes on the back of my hand or drifting thoughts into a pragmatic list ready to deal with in order of priority.

It syncs to a mobile app, and desktop version so you can jot entries down whether at your desk or on the move.

The collaborative aspect of this application comes from its ability to share lists with other users, allowing teams to work from the same list, add notes and assign themselves to completing the task.

Slack

Slack really shook-up the Instant Messaging space with its approach to categorising messages within channels. After-all, Teams pulled many of its features straight from Slack.

For companies that opt to take the more serious approach (such as the healthcare and public sector), then Slack likely is not for you as it doesn’t sync with your Office 365 ecosystem and tends to be a little more ‘playful’ than Teams.

For those loving the ‘Googley’ user interface then take some time to explore what integrations you can install to maximise your productivity to an even greater extent: https://slack.com/apps

Zapier, supercharge your productivity

So you’ve now got a few software solutions under your belt, and you’re effectively in-sync with your team, but now you want to put some double strength caffeine into your workflows — Zapier is how you do it.

Zapier is a global remote company that allows end users to integrate the web applications they use. This product is completely underrated, removing needless admin tasks by truly making the software work for you.

Consider this, your colleague has entered a new line on a spreadsheet, that you would like to know about, and then populate another database with the same information. Well, Zapier can be easily configured to send you an email when a line is added to a spreadsheet, and transcribe that data to another software — it sounds so simple, but in some organisations this software would actually put some people out of a job.

Possibly excessive for a few weeks of remote work, but the potential hours saved would be seen as dark magic a few decades ago, and something worth taking back to the office as a time saving initiative.

If you use Microsoft products mainly within your company, then check out their Zapier equivalent: https://emea.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/

SharePoint rules all

If you’re not already using SharePoint or something similar in your workplace, then questions need to be asked as to whether you’re ready for working from the cloud at all.

SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and usage varies substantially among organisations.

SharePoint can be as simple or as complex as you like, with options for companies to open a SharePoint document library and throw a few office documents in to work collaboratively, or built a bespoke system with complex automations, alerts and even apps feeding into it.

The out-of-the-box functions go far beyond simply working on documents collaboratively and syncing with Office 365, but with the underbelly of other features it could become the backbone for your entire business needs.

Gone are the days of having a highly complex intranet site. SharePoint has vast amounts of features that can be set up without coding or a deep knowledge of computing. You could set up the foundations of a company-wide portal in a morning.

Check out the Microsoft support site to learn the basics of starting your SharePoint database: Microsoft Support

Duet Display, double the productivity.

Duet Display allows you to use your iPad or iPhone as an extra display. Developed by a team of ex-Apple engineers, it was the ultimate portable duel-screen experience. Of course, now we have Apple side-car (for Mac users) but if your split between using an iPad and your work’s windows PC, then this gifts you that same benefit.

At the office most of us will be used to having a duel, or even a tri-screen setup. At home you will start to miss that expansive screen real-estate when flipping from email to spreadsheets all day long.

If you happen to be part of the Mac clan though, give the Side-Car function a try over a simple inbuilt Bluetooth connection.

Dronestream, for remote drone operations.

Being somewhat of an obsessive when it comes to remote software and technology, a small team and I created Dronestream to enable remote teams to collaborate with their drone pilots.

Although not suitable for every organisation, Dronestream allows a single drone pilot to venture to a construction site, pipeline, landmass or other area of interest and work collaboratively with remote subject matter experts anywhere in the world.

Dronestream does this by broadcasting all the useful data the pilot is receiving (such as the live video, map location, telemetry) to mobile apps or browsers where the viewers can get eyes-on the area of interest from the convenience of — well anywhere.

With many exciting integrations on the horizon in the coming months, I really hope you get chance to follow our progress.

Check out our website at: www.drone-stream.com

Wrap up

Who knows, after fully digging into the above options you could return to the office with a whole new tool belt of cloud based applications ready to deploy mainstream within your organisation!

If you want to delve further into how to remain an effective team while operating remotely I highly recommend this article by FirstRound that outlines some great methods, not just for startups: https://firstround.com/review/staying-connected-is-key-to-your-startups-survival-heres-how-to-nail-internal-comms/

Finally, feel free to drop me an email to discuss your thoughts on remote software, and cloud solutions: Harry@dronestream.app


Work remotely, with the right software was originally published in Future Vision on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.


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