General Consultant Discussion

I don't know who out there have any remote employees but as of today, 1/3 of our CS3 employees now work from remote locations and I don't anticipate this to change anytime soon. Our remote staff are made up of both consulting and sales team members and I find that I am running into more and more challenges getting their home / remote networks configured to work stably and consistently with our CS3 environment. I am wondering if any of you are wrestling with similar situations and if so, how you are addressing it. I have decided that we need to establish a set of minimum system requirements for each employee operating environment including a home router/firewall, a wired connection from the internet router to the employee's laptop and VOIP phone, VPN requirements, and minimum internet bandwidth. I'm hoping one of you might have something already established that I could leverage as a starting place. Whatever I come up with, I would be happy to share with those who help.

Of our firms 40 employees only 5 work in the main office, all admin. We offloaded exchange to Outlook365 and everything else is Citrix on Azure servers. Most of us are issues laptops - some PC some Mac - but each uses what's easiest for them since no software installs are required. Personally, I use VMWare on an iMac and all works great.

@BillPfahnl, we have a similar setup with Office365, Jive, GoToAssist/Meeting, Evernote, Dropbox, VPN, and Remote desktop. We haven't moved to Azure as yet. My challenge has more to do with each employee's home network. I spend an inordinate amount of time troubleshooting issues with personal routers, internet providers, bandwidth issues, VOIP QOS, inadequate wifi coverage, etc. Many times, folks working from home are used to consumer level requirements for web surfing. That's all well and good until you try to implement a VOIP service across a wifi environment where the router is in the basement and the office with PC with the softphone is on the second story of the house. Can't pull a wire because it might mess up the custom, hand painted wall paper in the office. Yikes!

ASI is struggling with this as well. We have good remote users so we don't have problems YET. We are trying to link in calendars and schedules so that we know how to effectively use the remote team members better.

I use Zyxel powerline ethernet adapters to overcome wifi coverage issues and it works pretty well. Subject to the quality of each house's internal wiring, but worth a try. Put one wired to the router and another in the office. They cannot be connected to surge protectors. They have a version with 4 Ethernet ports if someone has several devices to connect in the office.

@PhilMcIntosh thanks for the recommendation. I will probably purchase a couple to test. This will help where cabling is not an option. However, when the wifi connection is sub-standard, we will still need to find a signal boosting option.

No VPN!!! Straight Citrix and your problems are solved.... Office 365 and Citrix to our cloud. We are good, nothing in our office and PCs are much cheaper...

WRT VOIP - I've used my own cell phone for years. Downside for larger business is you have customers calling your employees directly possibly on phones that the employee owns. I think @MarkChinsky was using Ring Central.

Yea, we are a RingCentral Referral partner. Best system for a virtual organization. About 60% of our employees are remote and only 15% are in the office on a given day. It covers voip with traditional handsets, cell phones, pc phones, and full 'gotomeeting' type functionality. They also acquired Glip which gives you full IM/collaboration abilities. I recommend EverSafe for in office Backup & Disaster recovery. It now comes with an Enterprise license to Owncloud that gives you Sugarsync/Dropbox like synchronization among all your users so you can have common directories that are actually local directories but that are synchronized among all your users. Plus they are all backed up through the Eversafe device and off to the cloud. Unlike Dropbox/sugarsync you can complete manage your corporate data centrally versus it being the wild west including remote wipe. Not sure what other multi-user apps you are running at the office, but Remote Desktop/RemoteWorkplace handles that well enough without VPN. Can do traditional office & exchange or Office365 with exchange in the cloud. Toss in EverConnect in the HQ as a backup pathway for internet if your cable/T1 goes down via 4gLTE.

We use Jive for VOIP. It's a pretty cost effective VOIP solution at $23.95 per user per month. Soft phone runs $20. Unlimited trunks so I never have to worry about running out of lines. We use Polycom handsets that I purchase through Amazon. Right now, I'm just looking for a way to set minimum standards for the employee hardware / connection side of the equation. I keep running into challenges with cheap equipment, wifi coverage, and lack of hard line connections at employee homes. All the web-based tools in the world won't resolve a DSL connection, crappy network configuration, inept Internet providers, or multi-story homes with really bad wifi coverage designs.

Check out the Netgear Nighthawk router. About $300 but solved all my spotty wifi and coverage issues. If their laptops don't have it, get USB AC wifi adapters for those who have the slightest bit of coverage issues Sent from my Android phone using Symantec TouchDown (www.symantec.com)

Just saw this today. Don't know how well it works, but interesting concept https://influxworld.com/products/wifi-router-dock/