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In my previous blog post, we looked at ways of working remotely, away from the office. Let’s continue the theme by looking at some of the challenges involved and how we can overcome them.
The first challenge is finding a reliable Internet connection! It’s true that you can usually find free WiFi at coffee shops, restaurants and hotels, but many of them can be quite confusing to use. For instance, where I am, access to the hotel WiFi is time-limited—so you can only remain connected for a few hours at a time. Once time is up, you have to re-enter an access code. Worse still, you can only use the code with a single device. I typically travel with my laptop, iPhone and sometimes my iPad—and I’d love for all these devices to be online simultaneously.
In my case, I always bring a network cable with me. In many hotels you can find a wired Internet connection—you may need to ask at the front desk, or it might be apparent in your room. Both Windows PC’s and Mac’s can take a wired Internet connection and share it out via WiFi. This means I can connect my iPhone and iPad to the WiFi network shared by my laptop. It’s important that if you intend to do this, that you use a strong password to protect access to your shared WIFi network.
If you remember last time we spoke about using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution to connect securely back to your office network whilst you’re away. Unfortunately it’s the case that some VPN technologies simply don’t work on public networks, such as WiFi at the coffee shop, or the hotel network.
I overcome this problem by actually having multiple VPN technologies available to connect to my office. For example, I have what’s called an IPsec VPN—it’s a nice standard solution, but occasionally gets blocked by firewalls and other constraints. As an alternative, I also have a VPN facility that uses OpenVPN—a VPN solution that uses SSL, much like the secure connection in your web browser. It’s very unusual that I can’t use one of these two solutions to reach back to the office.
Sometimes you might not be near an Internet connection, so how do you access your files that might be stored via various Internet services? I am quite fond of cloud storage and replication solutions, like DropBox, Google Docs, or Box. You can work on local copies of the documents offline, and synchronize those changes back to the cloud when you do find connectivity.
OK, so you have secure network access up and running, what about voice calls? Just because I’m travelling it doesn’t mean I don’t still have conference calls to attend, or customer calls to make. In my business, I use a VoIP solution, and I make use of what’s known as a Softphone—essentially the phone becomes just a software application on my laptop. If the Internet connection is fairly well performing, I find this works well. Unfortunately for most of the time, this isn’t the case. Slow or intermittent connections make for very poor voice calls over VoIP!
For backup, I pre-arrange a travel pack for my mobile phone plan. This can keep roaming costs lower, especially if your calls can go for quite some time (I know you have these kind of calls, too!). Sometimes you can even rent a drop-in office for a day and get very reasonable telecom rates as part of that rental; it’s worth checking out before you travel. You can also go down the route of unlocking your cellphone and buying an in-country SIM—effectively giving you in-country calling rates. You should talk to your mobile provider about how to go about this.
Last and not least, if you have a tablet, they make much better work tools on an aircraft than a standard laptop if you’re flying economy! I always like to set-up my tablet to allow me to work on key documents, take notes or other tasks, so I can keep working during otherwise unproductive time.
Safe and productive travels, friends!
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