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That sounds desperate I know but here it goes:

My wife got a great job offer to move out of state on Monday. We both decided it was the best thing for our family so she accepted and we’re slated to be moved toward the end of this month.

I truly have a job I love and a boss who is extremely supportive of me and always has been. I had to drop the news on him this morning that I was moving. After the initial shock he has asked me to come up with some ideas on how I can work remotely and keep me as a full time employee.

Here are my job duties (abbreviated):

Network Administration - responsible for network health
System Administration - responsible for all Windows Servers and VMWare Infrastructure including SAN management
SharePoint Administration
Exchange Online and Lync Online Administration

The reality is that I do not need to be a ‘butt in the seat’ guy. However I also handle user support and backup for folks as well.

Here are my thoughts on this:

  1. I will be in a permanent 90 day trial. If he or I do not think it is working then we re-evaluate and terminate my employment.

  2. Have weekly calls with my boss and team to stay in contact. This happens already in person and we have the tech to do short video calls as well.

  3. Work more on a project basis to show true progress in my work

  4. Finish up our infrastructure monitoring with the tools we have in place now.

  5. Come onsite monthly or quarterly to handle any physical changes to the network and touch base with users. Question here - who pays and for how long?

Here is the infrastructure I would need:

  1. High-Speed Internet connection
  2. Laptop/Tablet - have
  3. Dual Monitor Setup
  4. MF Printer
  5. SmartPhone - have

Here’s where I ask for your help Spiceheads. What other things do we need to take into consideration?

Edit 10/16/2013

Good news Spiceheads!!! I’m going to be able to work remotely for now. We’re still working out the details but I wanted to express my gratitude for the great suggestions and support!

@HP

56 Spice ups
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VPN connection to the office, and a “command center” PC on the office LAN that you can remote into from your remote laptop after you VPN in. Other than that, maybe see if you can get a remote VOIP phone going provided you have VOIP at that office already.

Seems you have everything else covered.

36 Spice ups
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MiFi maybe? Seems you have everything covered.

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I would recommend a power management system for your important servers so that you can remotely power then on or off. I have found that useful when doing remote support. We use an APC system.

16 Spice ups
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I work remotely from my home once a week(pretty much a one man shop though I do have folks who can assist with some items). So I have two questions for you.

  1. What happens when your home internet goes out.

  2. What happens when a key piece of onsite infrastructure hardware in the office goes down.

As Kris mentioned iLO or iDrac (HP/Dell respectively) are like a must…

7 Spice ups
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Maybe an opportunity for an intern to do that menial work in the office (should this last more than 90 days)

video conferencing software and hardware, nothing expensive just to use for the meetings.

VPN connection?

2 Spice ups
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Yeah I’m going to agree with the VPN solution.

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How many people are in your department? Is there someone onsite to put out the fires? If you are the only IT guy there, then this probably won’t work, since there is no one to do the day to day user support stuff or act as an emergency go to in the case of system failure.

I’d personally cringe att permanently being on a 90 trial, there simply is no job security in it. You would be better off asking for a 6mo trial with it becoming permanent after that point (6mo is more than enough time to see if it will work or not).

Being onsite one day a month would probably be more than enough for most things, with the idea you’d be there within 24-48 hours in the case of a real emergency, or that you can plan multiple days for larger projects.

But given your description, I don’t really see why this would not work out and I can’t think of much else that you would need.

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coffee

4 Spice ups
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Also, that’s quite nice of your boss. Hope it works out well

11 Spice ups
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Sounds as if you have some good suggestions and a lot of the bases covered yourself. I admit, I envy you. There isn’t much sense in me occupying a seat at the office either, but if I’m not present it is perceived that I am not providing any service to the company. So, sounds as if you have a sweet gig in the works.

2 Spice ups
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The lack of need to wear pants I envy you for sir.

15 Spice ups
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If you’re expected to be full time, maybe the company would be willing to foot the bill for your net at home, since you’re going to be hogging the bandwidth with any solution.

3 Spice ups
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what about an IP KVM switch - that way you can ‘see’ your servers. (even when they have the message)

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Great questions. We have redundant internet connections so we’ve got that covered. If it’s down we’re at the mercy of the ISP(s) even if I’m in the office
I have iLO setup on my VMWare hosts and all other servers that

4 Spice ups
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I do this already- one of the best things you’ll need is self control (not to work too few hours, but working too many- there’s no going home after work since you’re already there). The list you’ve posted in the OP is pretty much what I’ve got in place already, works very well.

You will want/need an onsite minion of some form for user support however- that has got to be my biggest headache at the moment, as users will always unplug something and still expect you to fix it remotely.

4 Spice ups
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I worked in the UK as part of a team in Sweden, the biggest challenge was keeping up to date with communication, think about the decisions made in the office over a coffee or a chat when passing by a desk.

I would put some structures in place to keep up to date such as scheduled meetings, Lync chats with co-workers, reply to every email.

Good luck

Ben

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When you’re in the office up until your departure, work with the mindset that you can’t physically touch anything away from your desk. Take a mental note of every time you hit a roadblock and either find a work-around or document the deficiency and find another solution. This will give you an idea of the issues that require you to be in the office and it’ll prepare you for working remotely.

Also, there are some KVM and other management products that will allow you to do things like power down a server or access the BIOS remotely. You may want to consider testing and implementing these before you leave.

For your new home:

  • Your ISP will be critically important. You may want to consider using a business-class service even if it’s just from your cable company. You’ll likely get better support and the option to have a static IP, which could prove useful.
  • From a different provider, check out wireless tethering from your smartphone in the event your home Internet goes down. Plan to have a softphone so you can place and receive calls through the company’s phone system.
  • You should plan to have a dedicated home-office from which you will work as if you were at your regular office.
  • You might want to consider space for a test lab of physical/virtual devices so you can do testing from where you normally work.

For visits back to the office, I would negotiate that the company pay for these as if they were a regular business trip. It sounds like they’re really intent on keeping you, so they should be flexible in this area.

Also, depending on the size of the company, you might want to consider adding redundant Internet access at the office just in case their connection goes down. You could also invest in a part-time IT intern or co-op just to have someone on-site for when little things go wrong.

16 Spice ups
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This shouldn’t be a major challenge since it seems you’re at the server/network level of things and as such you’d rarely be interacting with the actual equipment anyway. At a prior job our Infrastructure team was in the UK, and the only thing that was a major issue was that they were working in a drastically different time zone.

I also had an employee of mine that worked out in LA, and we talked all the time via instant messenger. I often had a better idea of what he was doing than some of my local reports.

Your list should cover most of the basic bases. The only thing missing is if there was a way for the company to set up a remote extension on their phone system. How easy this is to accomplish is entirely dependent on your phone system, but it can make people a lot more comfortable when someone is 4 digits away compared to 10 digits away.

Travel costs should be covered by your employer. While you don’t want to quit your job, they probably don’t want to go through the hassle of replacing you either. I’d think quarterly should be fine. Time flies and if you’re travelling monthly you may feel like you’re always in motion.

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Do you want to keep your job at the same rate? You could look at getting a REALLY GOOD MSP involved to do things that you cannot do remotely like physically touching machines and use SW to dispatch him/her for these tasks.

Have a site to site VPN set up as well so you can manage things more easily. And if they have a VOIP system you can take calls directly at home.

1 Spice up