I work from home… and have done so for over seven years—since I joined our Syncplicity team. It was a big change from a few years before that when I drove more than 70,000 km annually for my commute. I also had a frequent flyer card with enough miles for a family trip and free nights at my favorite hotel chain. But now I work from the home office. Frequently the joke in my home is regarding the “traffic jam” in the morning in front of the bathroom door.
What challenges do you face working from home? We’re not talking about the coffee-machine that now needs to be maintained and cleaned by yourself or the printer that runs out of paper. We’re talking about files and project-folders.
Email is not a collaboration tool!
Does this come as a surprise to you? Ask your Exchange admin how much fun it is to manage email-databases. Many users abuse email to exchange files… large files that should not be dumped in a mailbox or let us make it a bit worse… different versions of that forecast spreadsheet being sent to the sales team and each account manager sending their version to the sales manager. That person has the nicest job to consolidate all these versions back into one single report. Why not share a folder with the team and let users work online or offline? From any device. Any time you want!
Avoid email. Share a folder!
Email is not a collaboration tool–also not for your external collaborators!
So, not sending emails with attachments, but instead sharing them in a Shared Folder… but your favorite collaboration tool does not support the ability to share that folder with external participants? Correct! Many tools do not support external sharing very well or they only do ONE thing. And where does that leave real-time protection and backup?
What if your mail attachments would be replaced automatically with a Shared Link (URL)–because let’s face it: Your users will not always follow the good advice and therefore it would be nice if the system would do that for them.
But when shared with Syncplicity, I can even stop sharing a file even when I pressed the “send” button because I can expire that Shared Link!
Your biggest challenge: Where is my file server?
Personally, for me, it wasn’t an issue… I was a fan of the Enterprise Content Management System (eCMS) and I think many SharePoint users, but then there is SharePoint, there is that One-thing and MS-Teams… where are my files?
For organizations where users still have a personal network-drive. You know: that U-drive or P-drive where only you have access to, home-workers are a challenge. Those organizations today require users to be on their VPN to access their files. No access from a mobile device, no ability to work collaboratively on the file. Did you want to share that file? Ah! There is that email attachment again!
And then those group shares? Now and then I hear these horror stories of users copying 100’s of gigabytes on an USB-disk when they are on the go or work from home and copying that USB-disk back to the file server when they get back in the office, overwriting the work from others that updated files on the file server meanwhile.
With remote workers, there is more risk of Ransomware…
There is more chance that a user would open an obscure document that starts to encrypt your computer with no IT-guy around the corner to assist you! Hey, and if you were connected to VPN your file server… yep… encrypted! Thank you, homeworker!
Not for me! We at Axway no longer use file servers! We use our Content and Collaboration Service Syncplicity that replaced that home-directory and group shares. And if my PC crashes or imagine; would be infected by the inheritance of that Nigerian prince, I just have my computer reimaged and all my files—including that report I finished a minute before the attack, are restored
No IT Helpdesk?
Duh! Why would I need a helpdesk? Maybe to get a new computer or a new phone, but these IT-guys don’t need to spend their time on me to restore files. I can do that myself.
What if there is a platform that does all the above?
– A collaboration tool that is suited for internal and external participants;
– Protects your email attachments giving you more control over shared files, no matter the size of that file, so yes! You can share files of Gigabytes in size;
– Replaces Home-directories and Group-shares so I no longer need VPN and can access these “network-shares” now on my mobile when I’m doing my daily run (oh yes, another advantage of teleworking);
– Protects against ransomware and data loss;
– Reliefs your friends from IT.
You can benefit too. Simply start using Syncplicity.
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