I’ve talked about telecommuting myself from time to time and it seems like a lot of people are talking about it these days. And while gas prices have come down considerably from the records set during the 2008 summer the economic woes are really massing to drive both companies and workers to seriously look at home telecommuting.
Within my organization we’ve been testing different technologies and solutions over the past 6 months. We broke the all the options down into two basic classes. The first was an all hardware solution while the second was an all software solution. A standard leased laptop was necessary to provide the end user (call center agent) access to the back-end applications necessary to-do his/her work. We also didn’t want to involve any home personal computers for the purpose of security and regulatory compliance.
All Hardware
- Nortel Business Secure Router 222
- Nortel 1150e IP Phone
- Standard leased laptop
All Software
- Standard leased laptop
- Nortel i2050 IP Softphone
- Juniper SSL VPN Client (Network Connect)
When you factor in all the ISM licensing costs the all hardware solution starts to get very pricey but will provide the best possible quality and stability. On the flip side the all software solution will be more cost effective but could provide less quality and depending on the applications being run could by less stable over an 8 to 12 hour shift (call center agent).
We’ve had about 5 users (2 all hardware, 3 all software) deployed over the past few months with great success. We’ve had a number of issues with the local cable provider (Comcast Cable) going up and down occasionally but those problems were resolved when a cable technician replaced a splitter at the pole.
The other issue we needed to tackle was how to provide remote control support for our Help Desk and Engineers over the Internet. We turned to Ultra VNC and are using it’s Single Click solution in conjunction with it’s repeater add-on. It provides a great cost effective solution to using a commercial solution such as WebEx or GoToMyPC.
Cheers!