The number one question we’ve been asked over the past 14 days is “Can you help us work from home?”. This has kept us extremely busy, as you might imagine.
The second most popular question has been “Can you please do something about the speed of our remote connection?”. The answer is yes. The solution can come in many forms – and can be a mixture of all of them.
Microsoft Teams offers you a simple, yet feature-packed, video conferencing system. Not only can you talk to your colleagues with full video and audio, you can blur your background, make written notes, demonstrate your ideas with a team whiteboard and share your desktop screen to show your work in progress.
Check your broadband.
One useful tool is a broadband speed test. You can do this yourself for your home broadband with tools such as https://speedtest.net which will give you a good indication of the performance you can expect. Here’s some tips:
- 1. Ensure that you are not connected to your office or any other VPN before you start the test.
- 2. Ensure that nobody else is using the internet in your house while you run the test.
- 3. Ideally, connect your computer directly to your router with a network cable to ensure that your wifi doesn’t slow your test’s performance.
- 4. Test results guidelines:
- Ping: This number should ideally be a number LESS than 50ms. The lower the number, the better your service. Ideally, this number would be less than 20ms.
- Download: This number should be as HIGH as possible. Expect to receive a number HIGHER than 5Mbs. Ideally, this figure would be in excess of 20Mbs.
- Upload: This number should also be as HIGH as possible but is generally a lower number than the download figure. Expect this to be no lower than 0.5Mbps or 500Kbps (These are roughly the same value but written in different units). Ideally, this figure should be in excess of 10Mbps.
If your home broadband is good enough then talk to your colleagues. If everyone else is also experiencing slow connections to the office, then it is worth considering upgrading your business’s broadband speed if at all possible. Most of the time, this can be done by simply paying more money to your service provider. However, it’s also worth checking whether your internet service provider intends to send a new router in order to achieve this – if so, it might be worth reconsidering your options as simply plugging it in straight in may not work and you may need on-site support which could be tricky in the current climate. Please talk to us before placing an order that would result in you needing to take any action other than paying more money.
Improve Productivity with Microsoft Teams
Change the way you work.
Another way to take a load off your office broadband is to reduce the number of people that need to connect by making most, or even all, of your data cloud-based. This means that your files and documents are stored securely on the internet instead of on the office network. Your team then securely accesses the files directly from their own internet connection instead of clogging up your office’s internet connection.
There are many cloud-based file storage solutions but the most popular and up-to-date is Microsoft Teams. Not only does this provide a fantastic file storage facility, but it also unlocks many other valuable systems to make it exceptionally easy to collaborate with your colleagues, customers and suppliers.
Audio and video calling similar to Skype comes bundled in Microsoft Teams with the ability to schedule video meetings with many people at once, access to a meeting whiteboard, attach files, make meeting notes and even continue a text-based conversation thread after the meeting. There are many other features that give the ‘Wow-Factor’ and are guaranteed to impress even your most stubborn colleagues!
Talk to us TODAY about managed Microsoft Teams implementations and how we can guide you and your staff to a more modern, cloud-based, business model – freed from the ties of your office network.
Just give us a call on 0115 8240825 for more information.
