Hosted Desktop’s get the thumbs up from me
I recently had my first experience using a Virtual Desktop. I work for an E-commerce company based in the south of England and I am part of the customer service team that provides quotations to clients and I also handle day to day queries such as complaints, order chasing etc etc.
Recently my company has been main a big deal about the ability to work from home. This stems from the swine flu outbreak where they were concerned about half the company being off sick. Apparently the government is also promoting working from home in order to cut down on travelling etc etc and because of this; the company has implemented a Hosted Desktop solution. For those who are not sure what a hosted desktop is, here is an overview. You can basically access your desktop from any machine that has an internet connection. You simply type in a web address that is specific to your company and then you type in your username and password, the same username and password you use at work. Once you log in you will have full access to your very own virtual desktop.
I stress that this is NOT the same as “Go to my pc”. You are not accessing your desktop at work. Instead, your entire network is hosted on an external server and you access your work directly from there.
I have to say that so far I am really impressed. There really is no difference in the desktop from the one we use at work, in fact i would go as far to say that if you sat me down in front of 2 screens, one running windows and the other running a virtual desk I would not be able to tell the difference. Everything is in the same place and we have access to outlook, local company drives, documents and we can even use MSN messenger which of course, is a priority :)
My company are being very flexible when it comes to working from home as well. They are comfortable with it because they can monitor what we are doing, all phone calls are forwarded straight to our mobiles so in theory, working from home is no different from working in the office, apart from the fact that we do not get the banter :)
Anyway, this Hosted stuff gets the thumbs up from me. If you are interested in the service then take a look at our suppliers Hosted Desktop website. It contains a comprehensive overview of the service and how it works. Highly recommended.
