Homeworking IT equipment

[MrsPeacockDidIt]

First time in Geeky section but hoping someone can help.

We (as a company) are about to put all our employees onto homeworking. We'll travel into an office once a week to meet up and do some work from a hot desk set up. We have a really limited budget to set people up with what they need. I'm think laptop or notebook, printer/scanner, and docking station.

Does anyone have a recommendations? We can each have a keyboard, mouse and monitor from our current set up.

Many thanks.

The first thing I would do is check what people had available at home, if they are going to need to increase their usage on broadband then you might have to pay for that.

Can they use their own hardware?
Will you need to provide software?

Will data need to be passed to a central server?
Will data involving personal info be kept by homeworkers, and what is the data protection implications of that?

What about spares, if a homeworkers kit fails have you a maintainence policy or can they (and you) afford to have them not working until the weekly meeting and have spares available there?

How are consumables provided - ink, paper etc.

Depends a bit on what you want (them) to do from home...

Have you office systems they need to access, or can they just work independent of any central systems?

Are you using Windows XP, Windows 7, some version of Windows Server at the office? How will you handle e-mail (is there centrally held mail on an office system) ?

What sort of budget (per person) do you have ?

Do they really need a printer, scanner - print to PDF and send via email may be a viable option depending on what they are doing.
Docking station is not needed these days for most laptops, just use the screen and keyboard which are part of the laptop. Perhaps consider larger sized laptops to enable the keyboard layout to be a reasonable size.

Consider things like remote login for tech support purposes.

Consider if they have suitable internet access.

For a larger keyboard, a 5 quid USB keyboard might be suitable (smaller laptops try to mix the letters and number 'pad' overlay, which is a pain - and if separate USB mouse and keyboard plugged in the laptop can be kept closer to pristine condition (and there are some latex dustcovers which may help protect against biscuit crumbs, coffee or wine, etc, getting into the laptop via the keyboard area (*)), so has a resale value when you want to replace...

(*) I looked into replacing the keyboard for a client's friend, because his girlfriend {or maybe he!} had knocked over a glass of wine into the laptop... first a non-trivial job to extract the dead keyboard (at least 25 screws and multiple layers to open and remove) then a similar amount of time to put back together again. I estimated he'd have a hole in 150 quid (around half for the keyboard). In the end he decided to replace the machine as it was around 40 months old anyway.

This isn't about the IT stuff but remember they'll need health and safety home working assessments and proper insurance cover. Its something clients often forget about when allowing this sort of set up (I'm an employment lawyer)

Thanks for that info, prepperpig

It is an area where I could one day have ~20 home-working staff...