Organizing Remote Work with Zextras Digital Jobs

In connection with the coronavirus pandemic, many enterprises were faced with the need to transfer all or part of their employees to remote operation. The main problem with this mode of operation is the organization of interaction so that employees can still conveniently communicate, work together on documents while outside the office.

Today, there are many software solutions for implementing such functionality within the enterprise. However, for a number of reasons, far from all of them can be used. For example, some enterprises are interested in a cloud service that would just work, while another part of the enterprises is looking for a reliable collaboration system for hosting on their own servers. A universal solution that would suit everyone is the Zextras digital workstation platform based on the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open-Source Edition.

This solution is based on open source products and now has more than 15 million users worldwide. Zextras digital workstations are chosen because of the good value for money. In addition to basic functions for collaboration systems like email, a diary, address books and task lists, the Zextras platform for creating digital workstations can offer full-featured corporate chats, collaborative editing of documents, tables and presentations, as well as support for mobile devices. Those who intend to deploy the Zextras platform on their own servers will definitely appreciate a reliable transactional backup system and the ability to hierarchically manage data storage.

For example, take a company engaged in the supply of industrial packaging. Due to the threat of coronavirus infection, the head of the enterprise considered it appropriate to transfer his sales department, legal department and management to remote work, leaving only warehouse workers and drivers “in the field”, providing them with the necessary protective equipment. Along with the decision made, a number of problems have arisen related to how the current tasks will be solved.



So, the sales department, in addition to making calls and receiving orders, must constantly coordinate with the manager the discount amount for a particular client, it is necessary to coordinate the sent commercial offers, as well as conduct daily meetings and meetings. The legal department also constantly needs to draw up and approve agreements, consult on certain issues, and management needs to monitor what is happening at the enterprise and give out valuable instructions on time.

For remote work, the company chose the Zextras Cloud service.from the cloud services provider MerlionCloud, which allows you to create a cloud environment for organizing email services, chats, document collaboration, data backup and storage, support for mobile devices, personal storages. The platform is distinguished by a high degree of user convenience, reliability and security at a competitive price.

The guarantee of the reliability of the service is that it complies with the modern standards of GDPR, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 27017 and ISO 27018, which guarantees control and quality of business processes, security and data protection, and confidentiality. In addition, thanks to 24/7 monitoring, as well as the use of advanced anti-spam and virus protection systems, email users, and therefore the enterprise itself, will be reliably protected from cyber attacks. The Zextras Cloud service itself is located in the European Data Center.



Thus, the company received a private, secure and full-featured email with support for such popular email clients as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, as well as mobile devices and many other modern functions. In addition, all the managers who had previously used public email in their work easily migrated to the new service.



The corporate chat in the solution from Zextras is designed in such a way as to be as user-friendly as possible. To do this, it uses a breakdown into Intercoms, Groups and Channels. They allow you to combine the whole enterprise into one big Meeting Room, where issues related to each employee will be discussed, and then create a separate channel for each department of the enterprise so that employees discuss their internal issues there. With the help of groups, you can organize interaction between different departments. For example, the director of an enterprise can create a temporary group, invite a product designer, a marketer and a production manager to join it so that they together develop a new design for packaging, taking into account all possible nuances.



Do not miss the messages addressed to them, employees are helped by the Zextras Team mobile application for iOS and Android operating systems , which constantly sends employees notifications about new messages and video calls.

The usual usb flash drives for file exchange have been replaced by Zextras Drive's private personal cloud storage. In it, company employees can store the files necessary for work and, if necessary, provide access to them for other employees. In this case, the files will not be stored in one folder, and each employee will have a personal disk in which he can organize the files as he sees fit. For example, an employee can store various types of documents in different folders.



Zextras Drive also allows you to provide role-based access to documents for employees. So, for example, an employee can provide access to a colleague in such a way that he can only view the document, and he can give his manager access to the document so that he can make various changes to it. In addition, you can share documents from Zextras Drive with people who do not work in the enterprise, for example, with customers or contractors. Therefore, many employees quickly mastered file sharing directly in the Zextras Team, which significantly increased the speed of collaboration.



The full benefits of Zextras Docs were evaluated by the legal department. This decision allows you to draft contracts together. Thanks to the use of this tool, the department even managed to reduce the time it takes to agree on documents compared to how much time it took in ordinary office conditions. Also now, employees of the enterprise have the opportunity to attract workers from other departments to compile documents. Thanks to this, the speed of compiling reports, contracts and commercial offers has increased significantly.

In addition to home laptops, employees are able to connect their Zextras digital workstations to their mobile devices. To eliminate the risks arising from this for information security, the system administrator of the enterprise allows the function to manage mobile devices. It allows you to erase data on the device, block or even disconnect from the server in the event of a compromise of a smartphone or tablet. It also allows you to disable the function of the camera, memory card, wireless connections and a number of other functions, the use of which is associated with risks to information security.

In addition, Zextras Mobile allows you to add an additional mobile password for each device. This password does not match the real password of the account, but it can be used to synchronize the mobile device with the server and is needed so that attackers who stole or hacked the device could not get to the server even after extracting the account password.

In addition to the cloud option, it is possible to deploy the Platform for Zextras digital workstations on the company's servers. Since the platform is not demanding on system resources, you do not need to purchase a powerful server for it. Read about how to install the Zextras Platform for Digital Workstations on your own server in our article .

With this deployment option, the backup feature provided by Zextras Backup becomes critical. Reservation is transactional in nature, that is, the system automatically backs up literally every action performed by users. This approach to backup allows you to reliably protect the server from encryption viruses and always have on hand an up-to-date backup of data on the server.



The function of hierarchical storage management provided by Zextras Powerstore allows optimizing the cost of ownership of the server infrastructure by reducing the cost of information storage. So, for example, up-to-date and recent data that users often access can be stored on fast but expensive SSDs, and old data that users don't access so often can be stored on slow but cheap HDDs, or even send them to the cloud S3-compatible object storage.



In addition, when installing the Platform for creating Zextras digital workstations on the company's servers, it becomes possible to achieve complete confidentiality of data in corporate chat, which in principle cannot be achieved when using public services and instant messengers.

It is also possible to add a full-fledged video chat function, which allows employees to hold full-fledged meetings in video format. Thanks to this, employees will be able to organize familiar meetings without any risk of contracting a coronavirus.



And with the Instant Meeting feature, they can conduct video calls with customers. To do this, just generate a link and send it to the interlocutor. After clicking on the link, a video chat window will appear directly in the client’s browser, and the employee will be able to negotiate or present the product in a completely non-contact way, without having to leave the place. Another advantage of Zextras corporate chat is the availability of a mobile application, thanks to which employees can continue to communicate with the team from their mobile phone without compromising the information security of the enterprise.

Thus, using the Zextras platform, you can create private, secure and efficient digital workstations that not only speed up work processes within the office, but also, if necessary, transfer a number of employees to remote work without losing their productivity.

For all questions, you can contact the representative of the company "Zextras" Ekaterina Triandafilidi by e-mail katerina@zextras.com