Solutions for the Remote Workforce

In the US alone, there are an estimated 30 million workers who telecommute at least 3 days per week. The growth in the number of branch offices, mobile workers, off-site contractors and home-based remote workers puts an additional burden on your already strained IT staff. Your remote workforce needs to use technology that helps them accomplish their primary role in your organization, and does not become a task in itself.

There are special requirements for supporting the remote workforce. Access to current policy documents, price sheets, marketing materials and HR forms is a key connection the remote worker needs with the corporate office. Synchronizing databases keeps management current, while allowing the remote account manager to control the content for their own contacts. The importance of efficient backup procedures is even more critical to staff who don’t have local IT resources to assist them.

Access Files

Whether a worker is traveling, or their regular work location is remote, accessing the latest version of key files is important to their efficiency. WebDrive enables access to files through the familiar interface of Windows Explorer. By creating a drive letter that points to a specific location on a server, any PC with an Internet connection can access these files as easily as accessing local files.

The GroupDrive Collaboration Suite provides similar functionality, but also includes the ability to access files from a browser interface. A mobile worker, located at a client site, could access files on the GroupDrive Server from a PC at the client’s office without installing software.

Read how Palmer-Gosnell Management solved the issue of sharing documents amongst multiple locations, and providing access to traveling executives using WebDrive in conjunction with storage provided by their ISP.

Synchronize Contact Information

For the Regional Account Manager, sales professional or consultant, contact information is often maintained on a daily basis. The information maintained on individual laptops is also part of a larger database of information used by corporate management. Synchronizing the data on a regular basis is necessary so management and other departments at the corporate office have access to up-to-date information.

WebDrive facilitates simple synchronization of contact databases without using a clunky web interface or a slow and expensive VPN solution. By using WebDrive to map a drive letter to the server housing the main contact database, synchronizations are as easy as if you were connected to the corporate network – even if you are working from home or a hotel room.

Read how Fidelity National Information Systems uses WebDrive to synchronize their Contact Management Database.

Perform Backups

The importance of regular data backups is understood by every computer user, even though the process is frequently neglected. For the remote user, backups are even more critical as there is no local IT support, and the contents of the laptop are critical to all functions of your job. However, the problems of executing backups are further complicated by travel schedules and slow connections to the file server at the corporate office. Using WebDrive in conjunction with a commercial backup utility alleviates these issues, making the backup process automatic.

By using WebDrive to create a drive letter that points to the corporate file server, backup utilities can be easily configured to back up all of your critical files to the corporate location. There are no external devices to connect to your PC and no storage media required. By using the Windows Scheduler, the backup can be scheduled to run overnight, so that slow connections don't become a nuisance.

WebDrive complements any backup application that can write to a Windows drive letter.