At Sangoma, we are already in our 6th week of WFH. Given we are a Unified Communications company, it’s been relatively smooth for us since we have a phone system that enables a softphone to your laptop or mobile phone with our office phone number, we have conferencing on that system, etc.
But a lot has happened in these just over these past few weeks. It seems like we started this months and months ago, but it’s just been a few weeks!
So what have we done:
- We started WFH on March 16
- Sangoma put out our Covid19 response via a post on our website and through email the next day
- We were getting many requests (some from existing customers) about how our systems can enable WFH instead of just being a “phone system”
- We put up a WFH / Remote working page on our website
- Support put up a Wiki for our customers
- We announced wireless headsets on March 31. (This was always in the plan, and we were going to announce this at Enterprise Connect)
- We announced our Video Conferencing Service, Sangoma Meet, which is free to all users at this time.
In review, our systems can help WFH because of the following:
- Your business phone number can go to the softphone on your laptop or your mobile phone, enabling regular business calls to get answered by the right people in your company. The softphone is part of the system people have already bought, so no additional money was required to get these people up and running if they were not using it.
- The softphone is not just a softphone either. It’s really a softphone and collaboration client. So you can chat on it as well.
- We have wireless headsets to help you roam around your house while on phone calls.
- We have a video conferencing service that you can use to collaborate with co-workers, keep in touch with your family, whatever…
- You can take your phone that you use at work home. It needs to be connected to the internet, it needs power, and the admin needs to do some work, but we’ve had customers doing that as well (or buying a 2nd phone to take home permanently now) quite a bit.
- Our UC systems have built-in conferencing. Again that is part of the system and is not an additional cost to use.
- You can enable the “find me, follow me” in case you need to send phone calls to your mobile phone number or your home phone number.
So, yes, a lot has happened in a month. I can’t wait until we go back to what we knew as normal, but no one really knows when that will be right now, so in the meantime, we’re all working hard to make this work.