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Working from home. What tools I use.

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Last week I came across an interesting article titled “9 Ways To Increase Your Productivity While Working From Home”, I agree with many things mentioned in the article. I do work a lot from home for many reasons (better coffee), one of them is that I like to listen to music while working and I don’t want to use a headset al day long. Another reason is that I am so more productive when working from my own office.

There are also many reasons why I like to go to the office '(and coffee is not one of them). But I wanted to share with you what tools I use and some basic rules I have. It is true you have a lot of opportunities to get distracted, last week I had to send away a friend of mine because I was in a meeting, There are the XBox, TV, books and kids that can distract you. For the kids I have one simple rule, door closed means no entrance do not disturb, if my door is open they can come in and will get my attention. This works pretty well for me. It allows me to organize my working day the way I like it.

What are the tools and technology I use on a daily bases?

My Windows Home Server where I store

    • My PC Backups
    • My music collection
    • My picture collection
    • etc…

  • Microsoft Lync, having a meeting doesn’t mean you need to go to the office I use Lync to virtually attend meetings, do phone calls and chat with colleagues.

  • I have second screen where I leave my twitter client open (Metrotrwit or tweetdeck) and I use to read documents, screen setup is in portrait.

  • When I have to host a TechNet livemeeting I use my home pc to record the sessions with Camtasia

  • My internet connection

  • Direct Access – A can’t miss solution for me, don’t want the burden of a VPN client and still want to have access to the SharePoint documents/libraries and other corporate websites and shares. With this solution I’m always connected to our corporate network, which also means that Internal IT can deploy new software, change group policies and many other things and I will receive it. Next to that I can use my own internet connection fully to browse on the net.

  • I use live messenger to be connected with my technical community like MVP’s, user groups and others.

  • From time to time I try one off the Virtual Labs we have available.

  • Remote Desktop connection to connect to my “private cloud” running Hyper-V R2 and SCVMM 2012 Beta.

  • The obvious office tools like Onenote, Word, Outlook and others.

  • My kindle if I want to read documents/books outside.

With our new solutions home working is made so much easier both for me and IT. If you don’t want to deploy solutions like Direct Access and others you can always make usage of our online services like Windows Intune the solution to will manage your desktop from the cloud, Office365 which will provide you with tools like Lync and SharePoint online.

Do you like to work from home? How do you organize yourself? What tools and technology are you mainly using?