As the prospect of widespread homeworking becomes reality, how can your enterprise use new ways to work to navigate a path through the Coronavirus crisis?

Since COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, governments around the world have enforced increasingly stringent social distancing policies. 

Millions of office-based employees look set to work from home and the impact of the virus threatens to challenge almost every industry. Significant disruption looks certain for all types of organizations as adjustments are made to a new way of working. 

For employees, the main task is adapting to remote work while maintaining productivity. But for CIOs, there are wider issues and responsibilities to manage – including IT investment strategies, the merits of cloud-based information management platforms, and facilitating solutions that empower collaborative work even when employees are no longer working from the same office.

TerraLink has more than 25 years’ experience in implementing enterprise-class IT solutions and we’re proud to be a market leader in six different countries. Our experience has taught us that these tools are some of the best ways to help build a productive remote-working environment and prevent a large-scale crisis from engulfing your operations:

OpenText Cloud

Increased resilience and business continuity

The ability to access business applications 24/7 from anywhere in the world enables an enterprise to significantly reduce costs. With the anticipated downturn in the global economy (some estimates suggest $1.1 trillion will be lost), the extra resilience afforded to companies through solutions such as OpenText Cloud means your company can plan for the future with relative confidence.

Remote working looks set to become normal for a large number of employees over the next few months. But even when employees are under quarantine, meetings need to be conducted and applications need to be accessed. With OpenText Cloud, business continuity on important customer projects is guaranteed by providing secure access to all information management applications and associated business documents.

Microsoft Teams and SharePoint

Ongoing collaboration and content management

Minimizing internal and external meetings is vital in the battle against Coronavirus, but day-to-day collaboration still needs to be maintained. Microsoft Teams is an ideal solution for disparate teams spread across several homeworking locations, enabling chat, video conferencing, calls and real-time collaboration on Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. In short, it is one of the most powerful free tools available.

When Teams is paired with Microsoft SharePoint, which enables the quick and easy sharing and management of content, knowledge and applications across an organization, workers have the capacity to conduct most operations as normal. Indeed, SharePoint is often used to power intranets, team sites and content management.

As a final piece of functionality, consider adding OpenText Core Signature to enable users sign documents from anywhere.

OpenText Extended ECM and Content Suite

Information access

During widespread home working, how will employees access information spread across several different repositories? This challenge is likely to cause significant difficulties for CIOs – unless they have already implemented archiving and records management solutions such as Extended ECM and Content Suite. These allow users to work with content directly in applications such as SAP and Salesforce, giving everyone access to the right information at the right time.

A Team You Can Trust

At TerraLink, our specialist team of IT experts is focused on solving the challenges around business continuity. With in-depth knowledge and experience of SAP HCM systems optimization, SAP Success Factors, Microsoft and OpenText, we can advise on all stages of a project, helping you to organize processes and applying modern methodologies – such as Waterfall and AGILE models – to get the very best result for your circumstances.

With more than 700 employees and 100 certified consultants, our industry expertise stretches across all segments of the economy. We have successfully completed hundreds of projects serving more than 200,000 users. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help you navigate all types of modern business challenges