My name is Scott Young from Optrics Engineering and I wanted to give you another tip for all of our clients, friends and colleagues who are IT managers and IT administrators.
This one we recently posted here on our blog and it’s actually an article from one of our partners called ManageEngine and it’s on productivity for our remote workers.
The article is called “Remote Work: Being Productive in a Pandemic”
This is a timely article because we’re a few weeks into the pandemic and hopefully the dust has settled so now you’re able to take a step back and reflect on how everything is going.
A poll recently conducted by Threatpost said that about 52% of respondents said that their organizations are mostly prepared, but still has groups of employees that present challenges in work from home situations.
This brings up several interesting points:
1) Not everybody is going to be tech savvy or comfortable or even aware of how to use some of these remote tools and I’m specifically thinking about Skype, email collaboration tools, making voice and video calls or even a hosting web conference or a virtual seminar with tools like Zoom or GoToMeeting, Webex etc.
So take some time to talk to your employees and make sure that they’re familiar and comfortable with your organization’s collaboration tools, they know how to use them and they even know how to access them.
2) How can you ensure that somebody’s home computer is patched and has the latest antivirus software set up?
3) Now that everybody’s working from home how do you make sure that they’re productive because they’re certainly a number of distractions at home including:
- cleaning
- vacuuming
- Netflix
- Doing laundry
- Keeping your kids busy
- Social media
4) What can you do to just keep an eye on things and just keep your staff motivated and on point?
ManageEngine has a unified end point management solution called Desktop Central and I can say from our experience as a ManageEngine partner this is an incredibly popular and very well received tool.
What it does well is it allows you to remote into a client or a staff member’s computer when there’s a problem to see what’s going on.
The other thing is to make sure that all the computers are patched and you can do this even if the computer is remote (i.e. outside of your network). You can do this by deploying an agent on a home computer.
From a productivity perspective you can also tell when somebody’s logged in and logged.
The other thing that Desktop Central does well is you can also meter the usage of various applications and network devices as well as provide the number of hours employees use commercial applications from a remote computer so if your boss comes in and asks “How can we tell if peoples are logged in or how much time they’re actually working?”, well Desktop Central has a way of doing that.
Plus you can also deploy antivirus software onto remote devices even though they’re outside of the corporate network.
Another thing that it does well is integrate with helpdesk solutions such as ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. You can therefore help resolve requests and show what actions are taken and view the information in a single console.
I’m sure you cringe when you wake up and you go to the office and you’re just not sure how many tickets you have to deal with that day. One thing to help take tickets off your desk is if a user wants something installed on their computer there’s a way of automatically installing it once you have approved them.
In addition, now that everybody is working from home and unless you’ve got a cloud enabled soft phone or a way of managing getting phones from the office to your remote users without them actually being in the office you’re relying on either corporate cell phones or you’re relying on them using their own personal phones.
How do you manage personal mobile phones?
Desktop Central has a way of doing that so that’s certainly another plus for Desktop Central but they also have a tool called Mobile Device Manager Plus. This software is another way of efficiently blocking security threats as well as monitor and manage remote mobile devices.
The final thing I wanted to bring up is remote access.
ManageEngine offers Remote Access Plus, where you can remote in, initiate a chat, voice and video calls, but the other thing that’s really nice is that you can record the entire session for review. Why I think this is important well certainly there’s the training aspect where you can keep an eye on on what the technician did and you can go back and review that with them and see what they did well, what was tricky and what they can do better. The other thing is if down the road an employee (or a client) claims that the tech did something they shouldn’t have and it had follow-on consequences (like a lawsuit) if you recorded this session then you can go back and confirm whether it actually happened or it didn’t.
If you are interested in looking at Desktop Central, Mobile Device Manager Plus or Remote Access Plus visit our website where you can download a 30-day trial and try it for yourself.
If you have a question, want a demo or a quote go to: manageengine.optrics.com
** Optrics Inc. is a ManageEngine partner
The original article can be found here:
https://www.optricsinsider.com/vendor-news/manageengine/remote-work-being-productive-in-a-pandemic