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How did we get to the remote

I think the most urgent topic is the transition to remote work. We are one of those companies that did not interrupt their activities for a single day. I would like to share my experience on how this is organized with us. The text mentions the names of the software, please do not consider advertising, we just use it.

Legal aspect


Yes, after the announced “holidays” everyone had a question whether to work, and if so, how to justify it. Personally, I’ll say about us that we have a large staff of lawyers (the composition of software products implies the availability of experts in this field), and they promptly provided information on why we work :) Firstly, we are registered as mass media, and secondly, after a while the Ministry of Labor The Russian Federation recognized IT companies as continuously operating. But if your organization is included in the list of backbone enterprises from the Ministry of Economic Development, then this is definitely a green light for work during the “quarantine holidays”. However, this does not negate the fact that distance is a priority. IT companies have the opportunity to almost completely switch to work at home, which we did.

Technique and access


Most of the employees at home have either personal laptops / inpatients or office ones. For those who do not have them, computers from the general fund (laptops for demonstrations or just working computers) were urgently allocated. It was also allowed (on receipt) to take their monitors and work chair, if required.

As for access, there were several situations:

  1. The employee has VPN access to his work computer. More often this is a story about those who travel on business trips or work from home periodically. No further action was required here.
  2. The computer is assigned a static ip (for many programmers - for the consistency of locally deployed test stands), but the VPN is not configured . Since it was their working machine that was important for all these employees, it was decided to issue certificates for remote access in bulk. We use OpenVPN, and access is allowed to a specific list of addresses, the main one is a local machine with which access to all the others is already carried out.
  3. Some in a special order, ip and access were urgently issued . We all remember that ipv4 addresses have already exhausted themselves, so this is already causing some difficulties.
  4. Some users worked on virtual machines (through terminal access) . They needed to issue certificates for access to a cluster.
  5. , , . « » (VMware Horizon).




Conf Calls . I will not surprise anyone that even before self-isolation we actively used instant messengers (in particular, Telegram), but the issue of choosing a single venue for online meetings became quite acute. We chose between Skype and Zoom, in the end, decided to stay on Skype - simply because everyone already has accounts, and there is no limit on the duration of the call. Now we are considering the option to change the platform.

For mail and scheduling appointments, we use Zimbra. One of the important tips from the head of the staff recruitment and development service is to respect other people's time and make appointments and phone calls taking into account the participants' calendars.



We use a webinar for trainingetutorium. In general, in some cases it would be possible to conduct them in the mode of video conferences, but the load on the same Skype and zoom has increased, and the use of a specialized platform is nevertheless optimal here.

Documents . For documents, we use our own EDMS (Code: document management), during the quarantine period it was replenished with several new routes (it is likely that we will leave them later). So, for example, we now exclusively launch invoices for payment in electronic form. Earlier, agreements were agreed upon in the EDMS, but the bill was received in paper. In the current conditions, the fact that we already worked with almost all the documents in the electronic form helped us quickly switch to the new mode.

Office


For those who are forced to work outside their home (for those on duty at the office), several things are provided:

  • , :)
  • -
  • 30-50

It is permissible to travel to the office only by personal transport, in exceptional cases you can use a paid taxi.

So in almost three days we transferred most of the office (and this is several hundred people) to remote work without loss of productivity.

Another quite interesting experience for me was the completely remote reception and adaptation of a new employee in the department. It was possible to execute all documents remotely, since it is permissible to exchange scanned copies during this period even in cases that require originals (an example is an employment contract).

The work itself on a remote site has certain psychological characteristics, and about this, perhaps, it is worth writing a separate article.

Mikhailova Anna,
Codex Consortium

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