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What, in your view, is the best work from home solution that is easily manageable, user friendly and allows good flexibility for all types of users to do their roles?

When we were forced to work from home, we had to send everyone home with compatible VoIP phones that could connect over VPN to our phone gateway server. It worked, but if your internet was a bit slow/unreliable calls were very choppy and not very clear, they would also lose connection to the VPN and often reboot. These phones also required POE adapters and cables so looked a bit unsightly. Softphones were also a bit sketchy and didn’t offer a very reliable experience, but I think Softphones are the way forward for less tech around the house.

We also had to buy a load of laptops and made everyone use these to connect to our Citrix servers. Citrix itself was OK, but people suffered when trying to do graphical things involved with web design as the resolution wasn’t anything compared with their office PC and high def monitors. We also faced the problem with how to keep these clients up to date and install the latest version of Windows to them.

I am looking at the possibility of using thin clients and presenting a virtual desktop to these going forward, but are thin clients able to overcome the above limitations?

Ideally, the users will keep these thin clients, monitors, keyboards, mice and phone at home in case we ever have to go back to working from home.

There was also the limitations of the home users internet connection. Clearly we cannot force everyone to go with the best ISP and bandwidth available, so what can we do other than buy everyone a standby mobile data router in case of emergency work from home scenarios?

I’m sure I’m not alone in this new world setup of working from home and I’m sure everyone coped in their own way, but I just wanted something a bit more ‘concrete’ to use and document as a working contingency plan.

6 Spice ups
2

A few things to unpack here.

  1. voip phones from home, yea, not much to do there as isp’s suck and most of your users probably have cable modems which is a shared network, so yea, good luck with that. i have a ton of users WFH and phone service is best effort. rarely do i hear a complaint but when i do they look at me like it’s my issue and our voip provider is in the cloud. i would steer clear of a mobile standby solution, it’ll make your life hell.
  2. as for your citrix stuff, not sure why you have issues with screen res and such, but unless their isp is that bad of your data center network has high latency it should look great from anywhere. my users citrix in via netscaler, only laptop users connect via our sonicwall vpn (executives) and they stay connected for days with no issues at all. citrix workspace or receiver (old name) auto-updates itself once you are on a newer version, don’t quote me on it, but i think it was like 1.5 years ago this was done, so no management of that is needed for windows. chromebooks are very cool as well!
  3. i do have users with thin clients at home b/c they didn’t own a home computer, most people don’t now a days, so i use ncomputing rpi4s with stratodesk. i can manage them remotely as they have a hole into the firewall for their management which is really awesome. when new FW is released, click a few things and i push it out at night seamlessly. i can connect you with them if you like, pretty awesome tech, cheap and no gotchas on extras like Igel.
    I’m doing a video meetup on Spiceworks today with Citrix and google actually for chrome o/s, so please dial in and ask some questions, you could win a cool prize but come for the education, lol.
    Lastly, latency and crappy ISP’s will make you toss your cookies, try not to let it get to you. You can’t control the covid-crisis nor WFH who have no choice on other internet solutions, 4g failover while reliable comes with high latency typically.
2 Spice ups
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Home internet speed is ALWAYS going to be an issue with WFH. Since you can’t mandate what you don’t control, it is up to the user to provide for a decent Internet connection. One option we have used successfully is to offer to subsidize their service with a quarterly payment (or monthly if you choose).

We provide a 50% copayment for internet service for those who need to WFH. This way, we can dictate that they meet minimum specified requirements, say 50 MBPS, instead of the VERY basic cable service of 5MBPS that many services start at. Since a VPN connection will gobble up about 10% of available bandwidth to hold the tunnel steady, having higher bandwidth makes sense, especially if they have other people in the household sharing the connection.

Also since we are paying for half of the service, we can dictate that half of the bandwidth is available for work use, so if kids are streaming video for school and the parent is trying to work and it wont hold the connection properly, they have a choice of either upgrading their own service or reducing the bandwidth usage during their peak work hours. If it is not sufficient, it is up to the user to find a better solution with their provider, which takes the issue out of I.T.'s hands.

We have also have people who shift their hours for work (say a split schedule 6-10 and 3-7) to accommodate the need for the kids to do their virtual classes, yet still have the worker available during both morning and afternoon hours for meetings. This works well for parents of small kids that may need assistance during their school time. It also keeps the worker available and productive and able to keep on a “same day response” schedule with emails and inquires.

COVID-19 has caused us to rethink how we work and the office may never be the same again, so we need to remain flexible yet still meet our business needs.

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There’s no way VOIP at home would be reliable in my (rural) area.

We converted our workforce to laptops with docking stations and issued company cell phones (which can act as a hotspot) to all employees working from home. While working from home employees forward their desk phones to their company cell phones and connect through VPN.

It wasn’t cheap but is working reasonable well. The biggest complaint is needing to reconnect to VPN several times a day after their home ISP drops the connection.

5

Do you guys use MS Teams / 0365? Zoom or other collaboration today? If so those make easy to transition to the cloud for voice which will help dramatically - even over residential connections. Nothing is perfect cloud is your friend here in whatever capacity you can handle. Obviously tons of cloud based voip options but what we have seen is an EXPLOSION of MS TEAMS Cloud PBX for the reasons you outlined above. Working on 2 dozen projects right now all asking for the same.

We also have quite a bit of WFH options as far as optimizing those home based connections via sd-wan type devices as well as VDI. We have seen a huge uptick in specialized products that are built for the Covid/WFH and I expect more to be coming out soon as many companies have decided to extend or simply stay WFH for some or all of their users. We have also implemented dozens and hundreds of LTE pooled plans for supplementing home based ISP’s who are not great to begin with - but then throw in the home based schooling, streaming locally on the connection and of course across the residential ISP network, it can be dicey. So using technology at the edge to combine the LTE with coax etc can be a game changer.

The phones and collaboration is easy, just requires a cloud based solution. AS for the other apps you have in play, would need more details but if you can move those to the cloud the answer to your question “What is the best work from home solution that is easily manageable, user friendly and allows good flexibility for all types of users to do their roles” becomes an easy answer.

Happy to chat more if you want to kick around some ideas.

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Daniel, I will also PM you one of our WFH online assessments so that if you have interest we can bring a few good options to the table. Or if nothing else, you can check out the questions we are asking to possibly help you narrow in on some solutions yourself. But we are always happy to help!

7

We issued older laptops we upgraded with SSDs and more ram to users that have horrible internet speeds and set them up to VPN in with the older laptop and rdp into their high powered desktop or laptop at work keeping a lot of the heavy data shifting on network. For some of our heavy apps we have been creating remote apps on our RDS servers to keep chatty client/server database-backed apps in-datacenter rather than burning up the site to site and VPN data.

We don’t have Citrix or VDI. We work with a lot of large pdfs, spreadsheets, and CAD drawings being worked on. We have several desktops and laptops that are light engineering level setups but not enough to really warrant a VDI/Citrix setup yet. We don’t develop/create a lot of data except in the Sales Quotes, Engineering, QC/Doc Control and CNC programming departments. Half of those departments are in at least every other day since they kill trees and scan them pretty often.

For phones, many users already had company cellphones and our phone system can ring both desktop and additional outside phones at the same time. The app can also set your mobile as your primary phone which allows you to dial from the app which calls your phone then connects the person you’re calling using your work DID number as outgoing caller id. This also allows you to call other extensions without calling the main line and banging around in the phone tree or between receptionists.

For a few users that have horrible bad, tin can and string internet service (thanks AT&T and Consolidated!) we instructed them on using their work cell for hotspot. For some this worked well enough. Some people we just couldn’t help since they live in the forest of banjos and bayou kittens.

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Some great responses here guys, thanks. Reassuring to know that you guys also can’t do much about home based ISP setups, might have so speak to the managers about subsidised connections though.

VoIP phones generally work well, but because people’s routers are in the other side of the house, a lot of them are using powerline adapters to talk to the router. We also had to supply PoE adapters. Most of the issues are therefore caused by these powerline adapters so maybe we should invest in a good reliable make?

Saying that though, if we can get a decent working softphone setup from Mitel that would be advantageous.

I think my biggest gripe is end user management. If there was a product that ONLY uses Citrix Workspace as the OS, so to speak, then great. Users can connect to our Netscaler and onto one of many pre-configured servers (be that a web dev setup host, sales host, admin hosts, video conferencing host etc…). So long as I don’t have to manage Windows updates on over 100 devices!

And when I mentioned resolution in Citrix, yes the picture is generally pretty good. But on high resolution images the colours are quite off and can become pixelated on something with like a ‘smokey’ image if you know what I mean. I guess I mean the bitrate is reduced?

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I think that VDI is becoming more and more accessible for businesses of all sizes and is no longer made for just large businesses with large deployments. We partner with a few different VDI partners to provide flexible and secure user desktop management. (You can find more details about our partnerships here .) Leostream , one of the partners we work with, actually provides simple remote access in mixed OS environments and a web-based UI for users to access their virtual desktops. If your organization is considering WFH as a permanent option, VDI might offer some the flexibility and ease-of-use that you’re looking for.

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VoIP in the cloud, not through a VPN, M365, and Azure WVD. If you need to keep everything on-site, can your firewall handle the traffic or do you have a bottleneck there. Usually, it would be the upload piece that would bottleneck you, but I don’t know enough about your environment. Bottlenecks could be anywhere now that we’re mostly WFH, and especially since most of us didn’t have the ability to plan ahead (or even budget for) a scenario like this. But again, there’s no one-size-fits all approach. We have a 2019 RDS server up and running for the few departments that need that thick-client access, web access for other apps, and then most of our other users are native app driven like Adobe CS, etc, so they all work off their machine and backup to external drives and cloud storage. VoIP like MS Teams, etc is great, M365 gives you the cloud apps for most things, and then an Azure WVD is great if you don’t have the ability to run things in-house like this (although be careful, because you can rack up lots of charges if you allow everything to run from it).