EP02 Must-have apps and services for remote working

EP02 Must-have apps and services for remote working

Hello Everyone

Welcome to Uncle Jack's English Talk Show

It seems like the Coronavirus is dominating the news as of late. Along with major conferences being canceled, there is news about companies asking workers to go remote to prevent the virus from spreading. For large companies like Apple and Google, they likely have a lot of the tools in place for their employees to go remote since they have offices around the world.

For smaller organizations, employees may lack the expertise to know which tools will help their employees stay productive and stay in communication with each other. I've been doing some research around these tools over the past few weeks as a safety measure, so here are some apps for remote working.

Zoom

Zoom is something I've been researching as of late as my son's school is making backup plans for remote learning if the situation arises. With Zoom, you can hold a large meeting for internal communication, easily display your screen, and then save the recordings offline. If you meet with customers, you can set up one on one meetings with ease. Recently, Uncle jack has been using zoom for most of my company's remote meeting with customers, I was quite impressed with the background-change tool that it offers, it changes your background picture with anything you want, if you put a space wallpaper as the backgroud picture, then it looks you are holding the meeting in the space! Try it, you will like it, and good news is that all new registrations are now free during this isolation/quarantine period.

File-Sharing Tools

If your organization doesn't have a tool like Google Drive or OneDrive deployed for file sharing, you might check out Box or Dropbox. These tools will allow you to upload documents and securely share them internally or externally. A file sharing service is an essential app for remote working. In china, most of us use baidu net disk, i suppose, right? however the download speed limit really sucks, which forces me to use some other alternative cloud drive applicaitons, like tecent's cloud drive.

Slack / Microsoft Teams

Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have become very popular in recent years. They help eliminate emails and merge everything into either group channels or direct messages. They support a wide variety of integrations as well. You can create channels for projects, groups of people, and more. They include mobile apps for staying in the loop while on the go as well.

WeChat enterprise

All apps recommended above are international or american brands, for our chinese, uncle jack believe many of you are using either dingding or wechat enterprise, right? I myself is currently using wechat enterprise for group or project coordination or remote meetings every week during this work from home special time. wechat gives you free Teleconference up to handreds of people.

Wrap up on apps for remote working

If your office is preparing to start working remotely, I hope this list of apps will help you make the transition. It's important to stay in communication and on top of projects, but in a way that works for all employees and employers. Thankfully, most of the tools that are subscription-based can be used on a month to month basis, in china, we have many free choices, so you aren't committed for a long period. Is your office going to start working remotely? If so, do you have any other apps or services you recommend?