Does Communication With A Remote Work Force Scare You?

First calm your server down, then next calm your IT administrator down as well.  Now lets talk about communication and collaboration and how your servers can empower a remote workforce, that will allow your business to thrive be more focused on efficiency, innovation and productivity.

According to a study conducted by Penn State University, contrary to popular belief that face time at the office is essential for good work relationships, telecommuters' relationships with their managers and coworkers does not suffer from telecommuting. Managers who oversaw telecommuters reported that the telecommuters' performance was not negatively affected by working from home. And those who telecommuted reported that they did not believe their careers were likely to suffer from telecommuting.

So you probably have concerns and security is most likely one of them, this is where server side technologies can help keep communication and collaboration secure.  With capabilities like Network Access Protection (NAP) and BitLocker, we can protect the information data on our servers like never before.  Additionally if your plan includes Windows 7 on the desktops the security gets even better with Direct Access. 

So what about the risk of not seeing your employees everyday? With your server infrastructure in place, you have a powerful platform to enable all kinds of great communication tools like SharePoint and Exchange.  However, the best communication tool has communication in its name.  Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS).  Here is a quick post on what OCS can offer your business Improve communications & collaboration.  In short OCS offers a unified messaging platform to allow your remote workforce to stay in touch, be efficient and more importantly be productive. 

One last quote to get you thinking about communication and your remote workforce from James Sinclair, CEO of OnSite Consulting:

“Microsoft products work for us. We choose Unified Communications because it mitigates a lot of the risk. It’s streamlined and efficient, and it allows us to work smarter.”

So next time your workers ask to work from home enable them to do so and still be productive!