For anyone who is new to home office and remote working their first concerns are often: “How complicated will this be to set up? How much of my office functionality will I lose?” Access to the company network via VPN (Virtual Private Network) and a cloud-based telephony solution can, at least on the surface, answer both of those concerns.

Use of a softphone on a laptop, a Bluetooth or DECT headset, mobile phone and desk phone all offer their own remote working benefits but the soon-to-be remote worker will also have a unique set of work environment challenges to face. In no particular order, these may variously include:

• Coordinating/synching with colleagues
• Mobility at home
• Background noise
• Availability
• Setup time and complexity
• Keeping the kids busy

On top of this, in the midst of the current situation, there are many new problems. For example, instead of occasionally there being just one person in home office, there are suddenly two. Throw a couple of kids into the mix and all of a sudden the whole situation gets even more complicated. Who works when? Is it even possible to have fixed working times? What about flexibility? Does that work? A lot of people are finding their own solutions to these problems right now. But if there is one thing that can really contribute to the solution, it is having the right hardware and software.

When Snom employees were told to take home office wherever possible, I packed my Snom D375 desk phone, an Ethernet cable and a power supply unit, a Snom A210 WiFi stick and my laptop and headed home. For convenience’s sake, I forwarded my work calls to my mobile phone. This was fine until I started making conference calls during which I noticed a huge drop in audio quality. So, now it was time to set up my D375 and take advantage of the superior audio quality and the comfort of a great speaker phone. The next problem, after checking the A210 quick start guide, was that I couldn’t find the menu point “network” in the settings of my D375 – essential for setting-up the A210. I thought briefly about using a LAN cable to connect my Snom IP phone to my router, but quickly dismissed this thought after realizing that my router in the hallway was not best placed for long cables. Hmmm. Back to the A210. I contacted our IT Admins (they probably didn’t have much to do in any case. NOT!) and found out that my phone was in “user” and not “admin” mode. This was quickly addressed by entering a secure password and voila! My desk phone was now connected to our cloud network. Easy peasy. The next few calls were a dream, fantastic audio quality and the comfort of a speaker phone plus access to the quick-look-up company address book.

Next problem: One room as an office with just one desk, and two kids. Parental duties have to be shared and this means hot-desking but my better half has a completely different set of working equipment for film editing. This means I have to be able to move everything to the kitchen table to keep an eye on emails, on-going discussions on our company Slack account, and entertain and feed the kids. So I have a power strip with my Snom D375 and my laptop plugged into it. Close the laptop, put the IP phone on top of it, unplug the power strip and re-plug it in and hey-presto, everything is up and running again! A truly mobile office.

Of course, we are still finding ways to make working from home even better, another reason why it is great to work for a company like Snom that has always had mobile, flexible and remote working as key functionality for our products!

Jason Green