The spread of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a situation of despair for the humankind. With over 150,000 cases and over 5,000 deaths, the widespread effect of coronavirus has declared a pandemic. The government and private agencies now encourage employees to work from home to avoid the spread of the disease at work. Therefore, now is the time for all the MSPs to prepare themselves to leverage their clients with telecommuting policies and strategies. 

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Switching to remote work depends on the type and the structure of your client’s company. And without the right tools in place, telecommuting could affect a company’s efficiency and productivity. 

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Therefore, Zomentum brings to you a handful of key technologies that organizations might need to equip themselves with for better productivity and growth during the remote work period. And you are the one, the MSPs, to enable them with all the technologies required!

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Teleconferencing tools

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When employees are physically at the office, it is easier for them to communicate with their peers. But the same goes for a toss when working remotely. To fill this gap, we list certain effective and famous tools that MSPs must enable the organizations with. 

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Microsoft Teams: Unified communication & collaboration platform with chat, video, meetings, file storage, and application integration.  

Google Hangouts: Communication software product developed by Google with chat, video and meeting facilities. 

Zoom: A video conferencing service that combines video conferencing, online meetings, chat, and mobile collaboration.  

BlueJeans: Cloud-based video conferencing service to connect participants worldwide. 

RingCentral: Cloud-based collaboration and communication platform. 

Cisco WebEx: Web conferencing and video-conferencing application. 

WhereBy: Clients can conduct video meetings with no logins or downloads. Video recording, screen sharing, and more. 

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Collaboration tools

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If your client’s employees don’t collaborate with their team, the work goes in vain. And to re-work on the same task is a pure waste of time. Therefore, look at the below tools to provide your clients with the leverage to make their collaboration technique easier. 

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Microsoft Teams: Unified communication & collaboration platform with chat, video, meetings, file storage, and application integration.

Slack: Instant messaging platform. 

Facebook Workplace: Enterprise connectivity platform featuring tools like groups, instant messaging and news feed. 

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Data access

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Imagine that your clients work on tasks but cannot share it with the team. How tiring would this blocker be? Therefore, provide your clients with options mentioned below for swift data sharing and access control.  

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Microsoft OneDrive: File hosting service and synchronization service provided by Microsoft. 

Citrix ShareFile: Secure content collaboration, file sharing, and sync solution to support document-centric tasks and workflows. 

Dropbox: File hosting service that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. 

Box: Cloud content management and file sharing service for businesses.  

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Security tools

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Now that the world is in a lockdown, and the organizations have enabled work from home for its employees, you, as an MSP, need to be careful about providing the top-notch security. And the tools listed below will help you enable your customers with security. 

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Microsoft Azure Active Directory: A multi-tenant service to offer identity and access capabilities for applications running in Microsoft Azure. Also, for applications running in an on-premises environment. 

Okta: Helps organizations manage and secure user authentication into applications, to build identity controls into applications, web services, and devices. 

Google Identity: Secure authentication system to reduce the burden of login for employees by enabling sign in with Google accounts. 

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Virtual workplaces

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Organizations with many distributed employees need virtual workplaces to manage their day-to-day activities better. You can check the below-mentioned tools to enable your clients with virtual workplaces. 

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Sococo: An online workplace for distributed teams to work together. 

Walkabout Workplace: A virtual workplace with disruptive technologies, place, and presence. 

Wurkr: A video platform that replicates your physical office. 

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Task management tools

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One of the most important tools that you must provide to your clients is the task management tools. Look below for a few of the efficient tool list, 

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Trello: A flexible way to organize plans, tasks, projects and more. 

Todoist: Organize, plan and collaborate on tasks and projects with teams. 

Asana: Organize and plan workflows, projects and more to keep the employee’s schedule. 

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Time management

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In crucial times like this, employees might be disturbed keeping a track of the coronavirus outbreak. Therefore, time management tools must be made available to them so they can keep a track of their tasks vs the duration. 

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Pomodoro Tracker: App designed to work and study effectively. 

Forest: Helps to stay away from the phone and focus on work. 

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Document collaboration

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You must help your clients with tools or systems that help multiple people to work on a single document or task together. For document collaboration, view the tools to enable the same. 

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Dropbox: A hosting service that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.

Notion: A collaboration software to keep track of everyday tasks and work along with your team. 

Confluence: Collaboration workplace where teams and knowledge meet. 

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Content and Marketing Collaboration

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Planable: A content review and marketing collaboration platform used to synchronize your marketing efforts from a single tool.

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I hope this extensive list helps and if you feel I missed out on adding few exciting tools that could be a blessing to all of us during the work from home interval, ping me at papia[at]zomentum[dot]com