If you read last week’s column, I touted the great technology we have today that makes working offsite or “working from home” possible today. During this time of upheaval, it is very convenient. You could even work from a restaurant…if one were open.
I have worked from home (WFH) many times over the past years. Having been in the technology business for so long that is often an option. However, I have never been forced to WFH over more than a few days at a time. Do not get me wrong, I still love to be at home and get my job fully completed, but this week I had an unexpected side-effect of today’s work from home game.
Our company uses one of the biggest players in the communications industry. With this software, you can communicate by phone, computers, VoIP, share computer screens, interact with the other person’s computer and more. It has always served well. It is also costly. I do not know exactly how much we pay for it, but it is a great application.
Now back to life today. For the past couple of weeks, many people who are still employed (happily, I am currently one) have been working from home. I have searched for numbers on this and have not been able to find anything about the actual numbers. However, I would imagine there are many millions of people working from home.
I also imagine that millions are also using the business phone system software my company uses. So, guess what?
All during the week the service was working…off and on. Yes, sometimes you may not be able to dial out. Other times calls and video would stop. Sometimes it would be flawless. At times the system would blink offline, online, offline, online. After contacting the company and a very long wait, we found out why this previously great service was having issues. Since there were so many people working from home the communications system could not handle it. They had never had so many people using their system at one time. So, they were working on it and it may be fixed soon. Thanks again, COVID-19. Now you are going to stop us from working at home, too!
However, I thought of Google Hangouts/Meetings (FREE-Hangouts.Google.com & PAID-Meet.Google.com). Guess what? For free you can use Google Hangouts. Also, if you pay for Google’s G Suite it is slightly different and called Meetings. Sometime during 2020 everyone will have Meetings and Hangouts will go away.
Basically Hangouts/Meetings does the same things the other application does. It may be a bit clunkier, but as far as I am concerned it is excellent. And guess what? It was also used by bazillions of people, and (although I have no idea how the usage numbers compare between the two systems) it had absolutely no slowdowns crashes or any other issues I could find.
Oh, and did I mention it was free?! Visit DoubleClicksLive.com, register for a free account and find out more about Google Hangouts with my free training session.
