back to article Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

Brianna Haley was given one day to implement Zoom for 13,000 users at over 1,000 sites. Haley* is a project analyst for a large healthcare provider that, as COVID-19 marched across the world in March 2020, realised imminent lockdowns meant it would soon be unable to consult with patients. And no consultations meant no revenue …

  1. Mike 137 Silver badge

    Zoom - March 2020

    In March 2020 Zoom wasn't guaranteed compliant with the GDPR in that it didn't implement reliable session encryption. This being a healthcare service that intended to consult with patients online, they should have been aware of this and avoided zoom.

    However nobody really gives two hoots - many GP surgeries in the UK encourage patients to communicate by email even in non-pandemic times, despite medical information being within the GDPR Article 9 "sensitive" category. But of course, all you need is "consent" to use fragile leaky services for such a purpose, then you're "compliant" regardless of the risk to data subjects.

    1. Naselus

      Re: Zoom - March 2020

      We already had 3 video conferencing tools in place when the business demanded we sort out Zoom for them last year. We politely explained the (very large) number of reasons that we felt Zoom was fine for chatting with your nan during lockdown but not for secure internal business communications, and refused to fork out for a license. They weren't happy about it but thankfully IT leadership held firm.

      The business finally, grudgingly conceded we were right a few weeks later when all those Zoom crasher stories came out in the news.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Zoom - March 2020

        Did your alternate video conferencing tools work ?

        We had a fancy video conferencing system to link to our European HQ - we discovered it didn't work for anyone outside the firewall. Fantastic for linking our office meeting room with one in the fatherland - but useless for connecting in from a coffee shop.

      2. tip pc Silver badge

        Re: Zoom - March 2020

        we had WebEx with lots of conference rooms in multiple buildings outfitted with the WebEx units screens, spider phones etc, book a meeting with 2 meeting rooms in different locations and it'll either be ready for your meeting time with both ends up or ready at the press of a button on the hardware in either room, staff and 3rd parties could join from wherever they where too.

        Then we got google meet.

        then they wanted & got zoom

        now we've also got Teams.

        from something nice and orderly to an absolute mess in a year.

        to be fair I think google meets is the clear winner for working from home, WebEx for integrated meeting rooms etc.

    2. cantankerous swineherd

      Re: Zoom - March 2020

      "consent" in the nhs: we just need to take some details is that ok?

      just say no and see what happens! most likely you'll be denied service.

    3. steviebuk Silver badge

      Re: Zoom - March 2020

      The IT department or at least some of them in the IT department would of mentioned about GDPR and been ignored. I've worked in NHS IT before and it's shit. Upper management just do what they are told by the trust directors instead of stearing them in the right direction. If you question it, expect a bollocking. Or maybe its just the shitty trusts I've had the misfortune to work for.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Zoom - March 2020

        add to that the shit show that are GP surgeries. It still amazes me the amount of people in the UK that think GP surgeries are part of the NHS (currently we have this "the government are selling off GP practises to big US companies doing the rounds on social media, horse shit they're PRIVATE companies already) where as they're private practises that can pretty much do what the feck they like, and often do!

  2. Captain Scarlet Silver badge
    Trollface

    ended up with a device that could handle 1,000

    "But somewhere along the line that mistake meant the company ended up with a device that could handle 1,000"

    Sounds more like a Sales tactic to me to get a customer to buy something they don't need, but glad it was of use in the end.

  3. jason 7

    I was telling customers....

    ....to buy up all of Amazon's refurbed Lenovo T430's at £300 a go like no tomorrow.

    That worked a treat. Been fairly quiet since.

    1. Version 1.0 Silver badge

      Re: I was telling customers....

      I reset my old one, updated to W10 and gave it to a friends kid so that he could get back to school online - that was so much better than just "recycling" it.

    2. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

      Re: I was telling customers....

      So that's where they've all gone!

    3. tip pc Silver badge

      Re: I was telling customers....

      stinkpads, no matter what you do you just can't make them go away.

      i've had a couple of jobs where I'd been handed an ancient well used stinkpad and been amazed at how well they perform and get on with the job. Second job they where actually IBM StinkPads we had to use, 4GB RAM and spinny disk too.

      they really don't need the nipple any more but its reassuring to see It there, the moment they remove it will be the moment its no longer a stinkpad.

      1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

        Re: stinkpads

        Downvoted for being irreverant to good quality kit.

        1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

          Re: stinkpads

          Not sure if I've shared this anecdote, but I had a customer* who kept insisting on installing registry cleaners and other such cr*p on his top-of-the-range ThinkPad. One day he was so enraged by "Computer Says No" messages that he literally flung the aforesaid laptop at the wall. I calmly picked it up, put it back on his desk, uninstalled the culprits then carried on with other things. Whereas other brands suffer from dislodged keytops even just from normal use, there was no evidence of the event, other than a slight dent in the wall.

          *The director of a subsidiary of a Very Large American Company.

          1. Naselus

            Re: stinkpads

            indeed, my own 12-year-old Thinkpad just won't die. The thing is an absolute tank and has taken more abuse than Meghan Markle at a UK press awards event.

      2. don't you hate it when you lose your account

        Re: I was telling customers....

        Upvote for saying it as it is. God only knows how my stinkpad keeps going

  4. blah@blag.com

    Nice article

    Really interesting hearing other's experiences, give me more!!

    1. Keven E

      Re: Nice article

      "...were best addressed by advising users to move their PC closer to their Wi-Fi routers."

      The first few weeks of hearing complaints about VPN *accessibility has unearthed the same two solutions:

      - Make the standard recommendation of plug directly into to you router... the complaint was the frustration of "I keep getting kicked off then having to log back on". I shipped many 50-100 foot cables.

      - Home speed tests showed the bottleneck of the "This file is copying so slow" complaint came from home internet access being quite dismal overall. That has improved now, not because of VPN accessibility issues, but because homebound streamers upgrading being unable to *handle the frequency of pixelation, perhaps.

      1. martinusher Silver badge

        Re: Nice article

        Trying to explain how WiFi works is virtually impossible even to people who are ostensibly technical. Decades of using radio sets has inculcated into peoples' minds notions about how radios work that are ntohing like the way that WiFi works so, for example, the idea that you're really sharing a quite limited bandwidth with all your neighbors is either met with incredulity or exasperation ("how dare they listen in to my traffic!"). There's the fiction of link speed which is really data coding rate inside a fixed symbol timing. The idea that the front of the packets -- the bit that you don't see with Wireshark -- is coded at a low rate. The idea that the modulation 'spreads' over a relatively wide part of the band so you're lucky to get three exclusive channels. And so on.

        We have cable drops at home for higher bandwidth devices -- PCs and the like. I may also be a heretic but I actually think that 802.11b is better for professional work -- its only good for a nominal 3MBits/sec but you're more likely to actually get that 3MBits/sec than you will from OFDM based 11g.

        I'm pleased to see that the obvious solution to increasing WiFi bandwidth is at hand -- we need more spectrum space than two narrow slivers of unwanted space that we get to share with all sorts of other stuff such as microwaves, cordless telephones, radio control, home automation, Bluetooth and what-have-you. Its a miracle the stuff works as well as it does.

        1. Wyrdness

          Re: Nice article

          My solution to home wifi issues was to ditch consumer kit and buy a Ubiquiti access point. I also set it to use the DFS channels, which tend to be unused by consumer routers, meaning that I'm unlikely to be sharing a channel with neighbours. The difference in speed and range is between this and cheap (or 'free') consumer gear is incredible.

        2. MatthewSt

          Re: Nice article

          Most people tend to understand it if you liken it to a primary school playground. All the kids are your devices, the teachers are the access points, and everyone is shouting and screaming. Basically it's a miracle any messages get across!

        3. Tom 38

          Re: Nice article

          b/g? I just updated the flat's wifi router to a an 802.11.ac router, which sits in a comms riser near the front door, whilst our devices are mainly in the living room, several walls away. My laptop syncs at 780Mbps (and gets ~500Mbps externally), my phone at 468Mbps (and gets ~300Mbps). There are flats all around us - I can see 12 other networks - but the beam forming tech (or something at least) works great. I was lucky to get 12 Mbps from the old ISP supplied router. TP-Link Archer A7, bargain at £50.

          Still prefer wired for the laptop though.

      2. WallMeerkat

        Re: Nice article

        I used a wifi app on the phone to try and find an underused channel in between the noise of neighbour's wifi and various gadgets (printer, chromecast etc) that want to use their own wifi network.

        In the end I went for a powerline adaptor. Ethernet works fairly well (good enough for Stadia), but the wifi extender keeps dropping.

  5. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Hats off

    I have to say, I take my hat off to all you admins who worked your asses off and did miracles to ensure that your company would continue to function in an environment nobody had ever envisioned before.

    It is also a testament to the general resiliance of the Internet that this flurry of activity went by practically without a hiccup.

    Hardware improvements probably did a lot as well. If this pandemic had hit in the '90s, it would have been a world of hurt in IT departments I think.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hats off

      Hardware improvements probably did a lot as well. If this pandemic had hit in the '90s, it would have been a world of hurt in IT departments I think.

      Depends, i'm not entierely convinced about that. The hardware was either less powerful or less present, but it was generally far more efficient for the designed purpose. Had this of hit in the late ninties then frankly I think we'd still all have been working without too many headaches. Differently certainly, but I don't think it'd have stopped us.

      The biggest problems in those days is that we were using racks of modems for dial in access to our systems. That would have tied the users telephone line up, requiring a mass deployment of mobile phones or ISDN lines for home use so that you could use both the data and voice circuit similtaniously.

      But of course another issue would have been that almost everything was being done on paper so things simply wouldn't have been on computer in the first place, but of course that simply reduces the scope of the IT requirement if everybody took their paper files home with them so where you lose in one area you probably gain in another.

      Add to the fact that the amount of work each person was doing individually was much lower due to lower levels of automation in place at the time and therefore the productivity hit taken through remote working probably wouldn't have been as great to each individual which would have been another net gain.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Hats off

        I think most of your reasons are good ones to prove it would have been a disaster. In 2020, we mostly have internet links which can take multiple users and run multiple simultaneous services. Imagine a family with two working parents trying to get work done using a single modem. Even if you could get extra lines out there, it would be hideously expensive and require a bunch of extra provisioning. Compared to a bunch of helpdesk tickets which say "move closer to the access point and use ethernet if you have the option", it's a lot more work.

        The paper issue is important too. We have a lot of stuff digitized now, which means extra work for IT, but also means we can go home without having a problem getting information to people. If we still had a bunch of paper, a lot of the workers would either need to digitize it themselves or to have a scanner and printer at each home. 90s scanners were big and inefficient, so that would have been a mess.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Hats off

          I can't help but think that you are taking the current situation, how you would work today and projecting it back on the past. Did you enter the workforce well after 1990 by any chance?

          Things have changed. A lot.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Hats off

            That's fair, but still, it's not all that different. It wasn't unusual at that time to have a house with multiple people working, but it was typical to have a single phone line. If the companies required remote access at all, there'd be contention between the people as they used it to use any networked services and the inevitable meetings, which would have to be a conference call. They might not have to be using it constantly, but I'm guessing there would be many collisions unless the companies could provide extra lines.

            Meanwhile, a lot of the things that weren't done with network services wouldn't be feasible anymore. If you could go to a filing cabinet to find a paper record in the office, it wasn't pressing to digitize that. If the workers are all at home, it would have to be digitized if either more than one person needed access to it or the contents were private enough that the one person who did need it shouldn't take it home.

            You're right that I'm young enough not to have experienced that myself, but I think at least some of these statements aren't missing the point too much.

            1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

              Re: Hats off

              "You're right that I'm young enough not to have experienced that myself, but I think at least some of these statements aren't missing the point too much."

              I was around then, you hit nail on the head. Yes, little of peoples work was in front of a PC back then. Those who did use PCs were not necessarily networked. Many didn't use a PC at all. Working from home would be all but impossible for many. Those who could take a PC home or had one at home AND had an internet connection would have difficulties because a lot of what they did involved data from paper and filing cabinets, from colleagues, faxes etc. Switching all that to remote working from home for those people who didn't even use computers at work but would have to to be able to work from home would have been a nightmare.

        2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Hats off

          "Even if you could get extra lines out there, it would be hideously expensive and require a bunch of extra provisioning."

          Remember when BT used to "split" a line to two houses? Using a modem on one of those line meant you were lucky to get anything close to the rated speed of the modem. I imagine you'd be lucky to get a connection if both customers were trying to use a modem at the same time. So, the logistics of BT going out there to add millions of extra landlines all over the country would be utterly horrific! Assuming the exchanges could even handle them. And so far, we've only talked about two working adults wanting to be on line at the same time. What about the kids? Online education in the 90's would have been almost impossible, let alone with two working parents.

          I remember having multiple PCs networked and sharing dial-up at home back then. "Is anyone using the internet? I need to download a file, your access might slow down or stop."

        3. gotes

          Re: Hats off

          Don't forget the fax machines!

        4. WallMeerkat

          Re: Hats off

          > Imagine a family with two working parents trying to get work done using a single modem.

          Memories of my 90s setup, my PC had the modem dialling up via a cable running outside the wall to the phone socket downstairs. Then a BNC cable running up through the loft into other rooms with PCs. My PC running a proxy server in the background.

          We had basic webcam functionality by the late 90s, nowhere near the high resolution Zoom calls that are now regularly used on the news and live shows.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Hats off

        "Had this of hit in the late ninties then frankly I think we'd still all have been working without too many headaches."

        Sun workstations could have all been configured with software and licence keys, but transferring data over 56K dial-up at home would have been a total ball-ache.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Hats off

          Not too different to the internal network such as it was, which is why there were piles of floppy discs around 90's offices.

        2. Korev Silver badge

          Re: Hats off

          Or you could have telneted[0] onto the WS in the office and then a dialup modem would have been fine (assuming that you weren't modelling proteins or something though)

          [0] I kind of miss how insecure we used to be able to be

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Hats off

            "I kind of miss how insecure we used to be able to be"

            Support modem plugged into the back of the Unix box. Dial in from a Nokia brick Communicator. Pick up email (this is one that will get the kids - Unix boxes have the facility for internal email so the overnight jobs email their output to a user who can then read it on a character terminal with elm or pine etc). rsh from one box to another - none of your telnet here!

            A client with problems would ring me at my main client's office, then unplug his fax and plug a modem into the fax line and, again, dial in from the Communicator.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If this pandemic had hit in the '90s, ...

      iI could be wrong, but I think that if this had hit in the 90's - especially the early 90's - most people would have just had to try to carry on going to work as normal, but with masks. I remember the '90's, and don't think many workplaces then were all that adaptable to remote working, and certainly not even close to the way they are today.

      1. MiguelC Silver badge

        Re: If this pandemic had hit in the '90s, ...

        Around that time I got a part-time job doing IT support for a small non-profit, they had about a dozen PCs but internet connection only came about a year later, and it was a paltry 33kbs modem (when even at home I already had a 56kbs one), and few of the personnel had ever used a PC outside the workplace.

        So if the pandemic had come then, it would be masks at the office or no work.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: If this pandemic had hit in the '90s, ...

          Or paper files at home, a typewriter and a book of stamps and a daily walk to the postbox.

      2. John Miles

        Re: If this pandemic had hit in the '90s, ...

        I wouldn't have been able to work from home in the 90s (and not just because of the lack of Internet) - however the offices I worked in had more space per person and only a few people compared to the open plan ones at work now. So I wonder if it would have been that bad

    3. katrinab Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Hats off

      If the pandemic had hit in the 90s,we wouldn't have even tried to get the IT to do home working.

      Yes, 90s technology would have allowed you to telnet into the mainframe over an analogue phone line, but, one phone line per office worker to the server room would not have been feasible to do, even if they could get the modems and terminals set up at home.

    4. Dave K

      Re: Hats off

      Same here. My company used Webex previously and it wasn't great. There was a project underway to migrate to Teams, but full rollout wasn't expected until mid 2020. As lockdown loomed, seeing a seamless and major capacity upgrade to the company's VPN, plus the expedited rollout of Teams handled in such a smooth manner really was a testament to the hard work of all involved!

    5. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      Re: Hats off

      If the pandemic had hit in the '90s, chances are the phone network would have melted down, not the proto-internet. Business would have been conducted over the phone, by fax, and for a few people, buliitin boards and email, with an even smaller number of people using dial-in serial sessions.

      For people doing traditional office jobs, the best they probably could have hoped for would have been a PC at home, and file transfer to and from the office, if they could have worked out the way of getting to their Netware and SMB file shares. And fewer people would have had PCs at home already, so the PC supply chain would also have melted, at least if businesses could fund the high cost of business class PCs at the time.

      Whether people would be able to do what they did in the office would be a moot point. I suspect that only a small number of people would have been able to continue working normally.

      Ironically, I probably could have done most of my normal work from home in the early '90s, but at that time I would probably have been one of the people called into the office to keep the IT systems running.

      One of the things I had worked out in the early '90s was how to drive an X11 session through the modem and firewall infrastructure that we had at the time (it was mainly done for computer shows and remote support, but I used it myself when I was at home), but I suspect that it would have melted down with more than a couple of sessions, even if we could have provided systems that could run capable X11 servers at home. At the time, I had an IBM 6150 (AIX) at home, which was a little more than a PC (and much larger), but ran X11 and Slip reasonably well

      I was not a particularly early adopter of home internet, not getting a PC capable of connecting to an ISP until 1996, and even then it was at 14.4Kb/s, which was also about the time I also started using Linux.

      1. katrinab Silver badge

        Re: Hats off

        And in 1996, Linux was only just beginning to get usable. Even then, it was much more difficult to get it running that it is today.

        1. WallMeerkat

          Re: Hats off

          I remember a Computer Shopper coverdisc with an early Linux bootable distro. I got a scrolling 1/4 a screen of a greyscale desktop, but it was a change from Windows.

          Got back into Linux in the early 2000s and remember fighting trying to get my wifi adaptor working. Then later trying to get display drivers to work. Updating and ending up in dependency hell.

        2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Hats off

          But SCO - the old SCO, not the litigation machine - had a free or cheap development licence that was only supposed to be used for 6 months but never timed out. You needed a floppy, and CD drive to install it. If they'd just sold the ordinary licences at an affordable price Linux would have been one of those archaic 90's curiosities that you vaguely remember and kids disbelieve. And SCO would have dominated the office server market ever since.

  6. GlenP Silver badge

    We were lucky...

    We already had remote desktop working in place but similar to the above we'd ended up with more CALs than we necessarily needed at the time which suddenly came in very handy! We also had a VOIP phone system with both PC and mobile apps and a lot of our users already had laptops or Surface tablets. We just added a few more licenses to the video conferencing (GotoMeeting in our case) and found enough hardware for the remaining users and we were good to go.

    Like everybody it's not been entirely plain sailing, our Parallels remote desktop servers have struggled a little under the extra workload at times but overall we've had very few complaints.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: We were lucky...

      Posting AC this time, just in case because...

      We turned up for work on the Monday morning. Late Monday afternoon we got an all-hands email instructing us to take home all our IT kit and not to bother coming back in the office until further notice. Following Monday... lockdown #1.

      Someone high up in the company read the warning signs and acted on them. No problems with VPN connections; three different meetings software available; IT on the ball; nothing has stuttered in over twelve months. I'm now in software support rather than IT support, so I have some idea of how hard those guys must have worked to put everything in place before C-level were able to send out that email. We recently got an email saying WFH is going to be permanent. To keep our sanity, we have a private chatbox going all day which frequently gets filled with stress-relieving expletives about various customers. We also have on-camera meetings two-three times a week, with a 'brown bottle' version on a Friday.

      Like one of the other posters, I'm lucky because I have a separate room as an office. I also won't miss the 50+ mile commute each day. I really, really won't miss the 50+ mile commute each day.

  7. Admiral Grace Hopper

    Successful test

    My then employer had seen Covid rip through its facilities in China and knowing what was about to happen sent everyone who could to work from home to loadtest the VPN. It held up, so we didn't go back to the office. Still haven't.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Two-day test about to enter its second year

    We're a small business with a mostly mobile workforce anyway. Our plan was to send office-based staff (normally around 15) home with laptops and have then RDP in to their office desktop. We had installed a new VoIP PBX about 18 months earlier, so we could keep the telephony side of things running and we were already on Office365. We sent someone to work from home for two days as a test then told her to stay there and cut the office to four people to keep its essential services running. Two days later we started UK lockdown v1.0. The office is now up to six people, plus occasional others as needed. And we have a new employee who would normally have been office-based but has never been here

  9. Howard Sway Silver badge

    "I called in my wife, maids, the builders from the new office"

    Really sympathising here with your tale of how difficult you've had it mate. Your maids must have been really knackered.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: "I called in my wife, maids, the builders from the new office"

      This was in the Philippines, apart from maids costing $bugger-all$ it's impossible to live in some countries without local household staff. There isn't a local Tescos and the street market apart from not speaking english, isn't going to deal with some foreigner. Similarly getting power / water / telecoms - you have to hire somebody who will have a cousin who has a brother who works in the right dept.

      Most of SE Asia doesn't operate like Zurich.

      1. Handlebars

        Re: "I called in my wife, maids, the builders from the new office"

        You're right about the cost of staff. But once I was at the in-laws in Manila when the broadband failed. They got me to phone the isp because foreigners get better service. They had an engineer round within a few hours, on a Sunday.

        Also, for a while Tesco had a partnership with SM Supermarket and you literally had a Tesco aisle there.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "I called in my wife, maids, the builders from the new office"

        "[...] it's impossible to live in some countries without local household staff."

        I was put on a project in Luxembourg in the 1980s. The company provided a bedsit apartment - rather cramped compared to my large house in the UK. When I complained there was no washing machine - they told me it was usual to hire a local Portuguese washerwoman. Having a collection of pink "white" shirts etc from a previous experience - I did my own clothes washing using the shower tray.

        I presume they didn't use the Levi 501 jeans advert in that country.

    2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: "I called in my wife, maids, the butler from the new office"

      Then I re-read the title.

    3. Intractable Potsherd

      Re: "I called in my wife, maids, the builders from the new office"

      @Howard Sway: other places do things differently. It isn't bad, just an alternative normal. Having household staff helps with employment and spreading wealth around. Would I like it? Probably not, but there are good reasons that it still exists outside the Western countries.

  10. TheTeaspoon

    Late decommission or redundancy

    Had many of the same challenges from this article this year. A virtual machine product which was due to be decommissioned proved useful for the first couple of months despite being an unnecessary expense the year before. It is finally going now but I like to think it enjoyed being so useful once again!

  11. Franco

    I was working for an organisation that was rather old-fashioned and very much against remote working. We were prepping for a desktop refresh so I had SCCM brought up to date and had test deployments of lots of software, we ended up pushing the VPN Client and Teams to everyone who hadn't been refreshed yet.

    Had lots of issues with the VPN, pretty much entirely because no design ever went in to it, it hadn't been planned for but was a feature of the newly installed firewall so got used as it was quicker than what I wanted to do which was deploy DirectAccess/Always-On VPN because some bright spark had deployed Windows Pro rather than Enterprise during the last desktop refresh.

  12. tweell
    Windows

    Citrix workspace reversal

    As an IT contractor at Unnamed US state agency, we were going to be shutting down the Citrix server as a 'cost-cutting measure'. Us field monkeys were screaming at management that this was a very bad idea, that we needed to renew the software and buy more licenses, Right Effing NOW! When told to carry on, we somehow had other problems and projects of higher priority, and kept the agency's remote access setup as it was.

    Come March, the CIO suddenly got a clue. "We need to expand our existing remote access solution!" "You mean the one you ordered to be disposed of?" "I did no such..." (silly wabbit, we IT guys always Always have a CYA folder). "Well, make it work for 5k users!"

    So, repurposing some hardware and hurriedly collecting the PC's that were going to go to auction as surplus, we made it happen, more or less. A remote access image for that old hardware and off they went to our new remote users at their homes. More management edicts ignored (PC transfer only, no keyboards, mice or monitors? Riiiight.) Lots of handholding over the phone, and some surreptious home visits for VIPs, as we were not supposed to do those, but...

    Now we're clearing out some leased office buildings, those aren't going to be used any longer. Citrix isn't getting hammered like it was, the remote access setup has the bugs worked out, and I haven't gotten that sweet overtime pay for quite a while.

    1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

      Re: Citrix workspace reversal

      "Well done thou good and faithful servant, now let's get on with those layoffs" as in the case of "Kane Ivers".

      What were they thinking! No IT users in the office so we don't need an IT department either? Could they be that stupid? I think you just said so.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Devil

        Re: Citrix workspace reversal

        And you're surprised? How?

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IT Director of a small UK law firm here. We already had some staff working remotely via an IPSec VPN but when March hit we decided that the existing VPN was too fiddly (given IT support basically consists of emailing the IT Director and asking me nicely to fix it).

    On the key day we decided to send everyone home in two days' time, which meant we had just enough time to ensure everyone either had a reasonable computer at home or provide them with one of the spare emergency laptops we keep. It also gave me enough time to finish off a project I'd started to play around with Microsoft's new HTML5 RDP client which really does make remote access a lot easier! Stick it behind CloudFlare Access (top marks to CloudFlare for announcing in March that Access would be free till at least September -- ultimately they then made it free forever for less than 10 users) and it's actually pretty secure as well.

    Biggest headache for us is phone calls. We do have a SIP based system so I could have looked at trying to deploy SIP apps to the remote users, but the issues around security/confidentiality knocked that one on the head. In the end we had a core team of four stay in the office (three managers plus a volunteer) to man the phones for about 2 months, after which we were able to gradually bring a few people back in (no more than 1/4 of the staff at any given time with an A/B team isolation in case of any infection). I have to say it's very weird when there are four people in a space designed for 25 !

    We've always allowed some remote working historically and we'll continue to do so, but we are keen to get people back in the office - we've had a lot of staff comment they are struggling with not being able to just lean over and ask a question of a colleague, or just stand up and wander into the kitchen to take a break and chat with a colleague when they need a break. One or two people are taking the urine a bit in terms of never being available to take a call, answer emails in a timely manner, etc but generally we've been surprised how well people have responded and stepped up when needs be.

    1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
      Happy

      Look on the bright side, the 'difficult' ones are identifying themselves for later pruning.

      1. Korev Silver badge

        Those "difficult" ones could be the ones trying to look after kids or people struggling with their mental health...

        Of course distinguishing the shirkers from those who were having a terrible time is hard

  14. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
    Pint

    It Was A Breeze

    Coping with all the How Do I do This? from home tickets & account unlocks.

    Deal with all the calls with those that couldn't setup, connect to their home WiFi or Service Provider falling over.

    Re-image laptops for staff that would suddenly be working from home (With only one person in the IT offices at any one time).

    Having to re-educate all those that had ignored or forgotten to set up 2FA in the preceding year, as well as those that now needed it.

    As I said it was a breeze as well for me, as back in November when this was all brewing our IT Director & HR purged 40% (All based in one location, that did all the back end stuff & prepped hardware etc) of the entire IT Department.

    The former field IT Techs who had taken over our duties:

    Ignored attempts for us to transition knowledge & procedures (Inventory management) across.

    Ceased to use the image file's & carefully crafted tools to automate the post image & first logon user setup*.

    Decided to do their own new thing on machine imaging & naming conventions for the new year & regime, grandly announcing this on Jan 6th.

    Had to sift & sort through the machine stock that was transferred to Corporate HQ, that we hadn't inventoried (Before or after shipping) as the IT Director had "ceased to trust & had expressly forbidden us" with that task & was on pallets somewhere in the building.

    So with experienced IT provisioning, Network, Security, Accounts having been walked out the door with best & procedural practises detailed knowledge, our attempts with some bitterness it must be said to ensure a smooth handover having met with abysmal failure by the "New" Team Lead & his Team consistently declining meetings to pass on some of that knowledge my colleague & I helpfully created server space with a few placed [Clicketies] for our now redundant & unwanted files. I wiped our accounts, we nuked our machines (Without the usual backup or at least to their servers) & left the building with my last remaining colleague February 28th & imagined the chaos while receiving updates from a well placed & still employed colleague.

    As I said it was a breeze & hence the icon.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: It Was A Breeze

      If you had any shares I assume you sold them quite early on.

  15. Hazmoid

    MSP experience

    I work for a small MSP in Perth Western Australia. We mainly deal with small offices and panel shops. When WA was locked down, we got panicked calls from lots of our clients as they had no VPNs etc configured. Fortunately most of our clients were running watchguard firewalls and we were able to set them up with SSH vpns quickly and remotely, with some instructions on how to connect and allowed them to VPN to the network then RDP their workstations at the office.

    I ended up working through as my boss decided to work from home (has a wife that is very susceptible to any infections going around) and I was the only one in the office. So I mainly never got to experience the joys of trying to work from home until we recently had a second 1 week lockdown, and the boss just told me to stay at home.

    3cx pbx meant I could make and receive land line calls on my mobile. With VPN access and remote access to most machines at our clients, I was able to resolve most issues remotely. For those clients using personal machines, I used the Spiceworks remote control to get in and configure VPN and remote access.

    Overall this has been a very busy time for us.

  16. B83
    Stop

    Toilet paper

    In the company I work for laptops became toilet paper. At first people were told it's only for the very important people, essential if you like. Unfortunately Directors thought all their people were essential and demanded laptops for every single employee. Luckily there was no time to argue and they got told. Imagine when the Marketing Director tried to rock up and say we are critical. Yeah we really need to gets those adverts out.

  17. chuBb.
    Thumb Up

    Business as usual

    But we had all predominantly wfh for last few years, but that's a benefit of working for a startup telco who main focus is wfh and cloud telephony, helps if we dogfood our services...

  18. hammarbtyp

    Home Office working

    The thing I remember most about the day was that I was already in a turf war with corporate IT about home working policy. For 4 years we were given a RSA key that allowed us to VPN into the corporate LAN allowing me to RDP to my work laptop. This was in no ways perfect since often it would not work well, but adequate for the 5 or 6 days required, but when I complained about it they were aghast and said this was not allowed (I'm an embedded developer so taking all the kit home from work is generally not an option). Instead they said I would need 2nd corporate laptop loaded with the IT spyware. However I knew that getting this past the corporate bean counters would be a nightmare (They had already balked at paying for a "engineering" class laptop, deciding that since the standard was good enough for excel it was good enough for anybody )

    Then we were told we had to go home, and there was a mass scramble for any kit that could be used. Those who had opted for towers rather than laptops, found themselves dragging huge pieces of iron back home, plus screens and their development kit. I was rather lucky here. Due to my argument about which laptop to get I had been delivered two corporate laptops, one which was stuck in my draw waiting to be returned, still boxed. I turned it on, loaded it with the corporate software, checked it connected to the LAN, outlook etc and took that home allowing me to RDP into my kit. (I still periodically get emails complaining I have two laptops which I file in the "not living in the real world" column)

    The next problem was setting a home office up. Fortunately I have my own space, but we also now had my wife who was also working from home and my two teenage children all furloughed from school and university. Again I was fortunate, not only by being an inveterate IT hoarder (much to my wife's disgust, but now relief) so I had enough spare ethernet switches, USB hubs, screens, keyboards and mouses to setup basically 4 work stations, but I had only recently moved from ADSL to fibre broadband (although not the super fast variety). Initially there were worries that it would not support the parallel zoom and team video talks, but has held up pretty well especially after I added powerline wifi extenders.

    and to give corporate IT their due, they rolled out a VPN solution quickly which allowed pretty well seamless VPN connection without the need for a RSA key (as long as you were lucky enough to win the laptop lottery)

    However I am one of the lucky one. I have a reasonable broadband connection, a big enough house so that we are not jumping on top of each other and enough IT kit and knowhow to get it working and maintain it. Many, including some of my colleagues, were not so lucky and for many it has been a real struggle

    It also proves to me that what IT says is not possible is often down to inertia and intransigence. The ability to do this has been around for years, but due to management suspicion (if you work from home, how can we trust you) lack of foresight and simple inertia it never was

    However the big takeaway is that for years there was big resistance to home working, but that has been blown out of the water. It will be interesting to see how many companies revert back to type when all this is over. My feeling is that the genii is out the bottle, and for me any forcing back to the status quo is just not going to work. This raises the issue of what they will do with those expensive offices in an around London when people realise that they can do their job just as well without the expensive commutes

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Home Office working

      "This raises the issue of what they will do with those expensive offices in an around London [...]"

      The government has progressively removed various regulations so as to allow commercial premises to be turned into rabbit hutch apartments. The question is whether people will want to live in them when there is no pressure to be near an office in London.

      Without commuters there will also be less need for service workers to staff the various shops/bars etc. The exodus is almost a scenario for Clifford D. Simak's "City".

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Home Office working

      "This raises the issue of what they will do with those expensive offices in an around London [...]"

      John Lewis is converting their flagship London store's upper floors to be offices for rent. M&S are going to demolish their flagship London store and rebuild it with provision of offices for rent as a major source of income.

      Neither of them appear to be taking heed of large companies who have announced they will drastically reduce their London office needs with a shift to home working.

      In recent years our northern London commuter town has seen many modern office blocks converted into expensive small apartments. The local youngsters have been unable to afford them and have had to move further north - and commute back into town for their work. The people who could afford them were London commuters who could no longer afford to live in London near their work offices.

      It looks like popcorn time for a game of jigsaw Monopoly - with all the pieces up in the air.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Home Office working

        I think the allure of having an office in the capital will take years to abate. Yes, the big established companies may be restructuring and at least partially moving out of The City and surrounding boroughs, but large spaces made into managed and unmanaged small office spaces will remain attractive to smaller companies and new companies for a long time to come.

        There will be a big change, but not as big as we might be expecting. Office space prices may drop, but there will be predators jumping in to buy up on the cheap. Some might find themselves with expensive white elephants if they don't adapt and if they guess wrong and buy too early.

        Similar is likely to happen (and is already happening to some extent) in all the major cities. That's why town planners are looking at revamping town centres to mix business and residential and more green spaces, or at least trees down pedestrianised High Streets. Most current town centres either date back to centuries of growth or monolithic concrete 1960's monstrosities. Few have been redesigned for the 21st century, they've just been tarted up with a lick of paint and few new buildings on the existing street plan.

        1. Tom 38

          Re: Home Office working

          We ditched the larger of our two central London offices, just keeping the smaller one. When we do go back, the majority of people in the office will be sales teams (on a rota, probably 40% of the teams each day), accounts, marketing and directors. Everyone else, IT, Production, Product Development etc will be remote 80-90% of the time.

          Basically, its going to be a place to schmooze clients.

    3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Home Office working

      "It will be interesting to see how many companies revert back to type when all this is over."

      Looks like ours will be reverting to type. The CEO does a video pronouncement every month or so. There are distinct undertones of "why aren't we all back in the office yet?" and actual out-loud comments about how it will be great when we're all back in the office soon. Luckily, my job is out on the road. I've not been in the office in over a year now. I usually only go in once or twice a year as it is. Being 250 miles from the office helps too!

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Given the nature of where I work, posting as AC. The Companies disaster recovery plan (what, we actually had one?!) did make allowances for home working. Unfortunately the VPN was limited to about 1000 concurrent users; which represents barely a tenth of the workforce; and dongle-dependent. The dongles have unsurprisingly been in short supply; many of them hoarded by users that don't necessarily need them, because previously it was the only way to get in remotely.

    A replacement had been in the works from mid 2019; using an alternative VPN that was good enough to get everyone into the basic office services but not able to connect to other domains and more heavily secured areas behind the other VPN's dongle-dependency. March 2021; I still can't remotely connect to those latter areas. For 95% of users the alternative is fine; the remaining handful have to either get exceptions signed off by the management to turn up to the office, or to beg from someone in the office to get info from x, y, or z.

    And then they wonder why people hoard stuff.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "And then they wonder why people hoard stuff."

      The IT department's PFY was sent to ask me if I had an Ethernet AUI to UTP adapter with a slim AUI connector cable. All their stock wouldn't fit a new server. I just happened to have one that I had scavenged from a clear-out.

      After a weekend office move - the IT department found they couldn't fully connect the PC of the company car administrator. They needed a long USB A to A extension cable. I never did get it back.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        @AC

        AieeeUmmm...

        Ethernet AUI trancievers? Who uses those nowadays!

        Only the most serious of IT horders with large garages or lofts are still likely to have systems that use Ethernet AUIs.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: @AC

          "Ethernet AUI trancievers? Who uses those nowadays!"

          The instance was over 10 years ago - before I retired. Even then it was a surprise that a server needed AUI. Possibly some legacy device that came with an outsource contract. I always kept some remnants of older cables etc just in case a customer had obsolescent kit still doing some vital task. El Reg has had many stories on such a theme.

  20. hoola Silver badge

    Jira Service Desk

    Now if there we three words to install fear into anyone it most be those.

    Forced, as we are to use Jira for something it was never designed to do and those promoting it's usefulness going round with their fingers in their ears this can only end in disaster.

    I am sure that for what it was originally designed for Jira had some use. The trouble is that it has morphed into a total abomination that manglement see as the fixer of all things wrong with IT.

  21. MisterHappy

    Was it just me?

    Anyone else have a backlog of projects that were delayed or paused because of "Reasons", including "The users won't like the change", that suddenly got greenlit because they included things that enabled remote working?

  22. GrumpyKiwi

    Got lucky

    I got lucky, I take exactly zero credit for how easy it was in the end.

    It turned out that all the stuff I had been doing over the past 2 years - laptops for all, managed external supplier VPN, Teams rollout, RDP apps for the ERP, remote device management - were exactly the things needed to let the whole company work from home.

    I also look after IT for a charity dealing with mental health. They were in the unfortunate situation of needing a lot of laptops all of a sudden at a time of low availability. They had to go to a local consumer electronics shop (sounds like Noel Lemons for other kiwis) and got a hodge-podge of massively overpriced and underspecc'd random brands and models. Luckily they too were already set up for VPN access and remote desktop so at least that aspect of it worked OK.

  23. Alister

    Also got lucky

    In February 2020 we started a major change to our office connectivity, moving from a 20Mbs copper leased line to a 100Mbs fibre link, and migrating from Cisco routers and firewalls to Juniper routers and Netgate pfSense firewalls, and rolling out OpenVPN clients to all staff. The work was completed on Friday 13th March 2020, a week before the office closed. Had we not completed it in time, there was no way our previous infrastructure would have allowed all our staff to work-from-home, but with the new kit, it all went smoothly.

  24. ITMA Silver badge

    Is anyone else experiencing "amplified" more frequent occurrences of everyone (not in IT) suddenly becoming an "IT expert" when IT tries to explain why they can't have exactly what they want/their idea won't work/is against company IT policy"?

  25. DeathSquid

    Yeah, I remember. People took their laptops home and were fine. Because the business wasn't running any Microsoft crap, everything was butter smooth. Google tools work from everywhere and just kept working. Mail, calendar, video conference all just worked. Shared docs, no problem. VPNs to development resources were long in place. Everything was already cloud based. It was an uneventful day.

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