Homeworking help during Coronavirus situation
We are making free resources available to help businesses stay running during the current pandemic.
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We're here to help.
During the next few weeks we will be making information available to help organisations who have Office 365 subscriptions and are moving to home-working.
Support that we are offering is:
- Free eBooks
- Links to relevant resources
- Free webinars
- 25% discount on any consultancy services helping with the transition to home working
Check this page regularly for updates.
eBook - 5 Steps to Help your Staff Work From Home
Your guide to getting your staff, up and running, at home.
Advice for Homeworking with Office 365
If you aren’t using Microsoft Teams yet, we would strongly advise that you engage with this as a collaboration tool. It is likely part of your Office 365 subscription already, and if not, Microsoft are offering it for free for the duration of the current crisis.
- Microsoft’s announcement about the free version can be found here.
- The best place to start to implement this for your organisation is this Microsoft FAQ.
If you want to find out more about what Microsoft Teams is and how it can help your workforce stay in touch, have a look at this 2 minute video.
eBook - Mastering the Art of Working From Home
Top Tips to help you become super productive and efficient.
Where to Start.
Part of what you will need to do is to get documents uploaded to cloud storage. Your choice is either to use SharePoint as a temporary ‘staging’ area to get you through the initial migration, or to use the File areas in Teams, which are actually SharePoint Sites in their own right with all of the permission set up for you. Unless you already have experience using SharePoint Online, we would advise using Teams.
Our recommended plan (see eBook) is:
- Identify files that are going to be needed regularly (don’t try to lift and shift everything – it will take too long)
- Move these into separate folders in readiness for the migration.
- Create a Team in Microsoft Teams for each of your departments/teams. or if you’re using SharePoint, use a single Site for this initial ‘staging’ piece and create a new library for each team. You can get more creative later.
- Use a migration tool, don’t drag and drop. This will allow you to do an initial migration, and then run a delta (Microsoft have a free tool that does the job pretty well), and it will retain permission and created dates.
- Remove migrated files from your file server, or at the minimum make them read only. If you have people working on the file server and online then you can quickly get into a real mess.
You’re then pretty much good to go. To avoid a large training overhead, the OneDrive Sync Client lets users sync folders/libraries down to their local PC, and they can then carry on working as if they are using a shared drive. If you’ve had bad experience of the Sync Client in the past, the latest version is a huge improvement over the old one, and we rarely now get problems with it. Do be sensible with it – don’t try to sync your whole multi-TB filestore!!
Have a look at this set of Microsoft training videos that give a good idea of where to start with SharePoint Online.
Finally, we are making our consultants available to give free help and advice over the next few weeks, and discounting any consultancy involved with Home Working by 25%. If you’d like to chat about what you need to do with Office 365, please fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you asap. We won’t add you to a mailing list, and we won’t try to sell you anything.
Alternatively, we run a webinar every week on Thursdays @ 2pm, covering topics on Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Intranets and all things GDPR and security.
Register for our webinars and not only will you get a lot of FREE information that will help you work better, but you’ll also have an opportunity to ask our consultants questions about your particular circumstances. Register for our webinars here.
