The shock to work from home came swift and fast for many businesses. Some were prepared, and some were not. Those companies with Unified Communications systems as their basic phone system, with their ability to offer softphones with the same business number, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and mobile phones that also utilize your business phone number, are at the forefront for enabling this new work remote / work from home environment we’re all experiencing right now. They were prepared.
Unified Communications is at the heart of what we do at Sangoma. And we use our own systems, so we were prepared. We’ve been taking business phone calls to our business number ‘remotely’ for some time. And getting on conference calls from anywhere. Our customers were also mostly prepared. However, we found out a good number of them used our UC phone system as a ‘phone system’ and we had requests pouring in about how they could use our systems to Work From Home. Thankfully, they could and we responded by putting up a WFH webpage and WFH support wiki swiftly.
This is why I see this whole pandemic as a tipping point for businesses and the use of Unified Communication systems. While UC systems were ‘nice’ before, they are now essential. And they’ll continue to be.
But another, predictable sort of phenomena we’re seeing is articles about missing the sense of community, camaraderie and really just necessary human interaction that comes with chit-chat at a water cooler, coffee station or lunch room, and starting to see more and more articles about how to combat loneliness as we self-isolate right now. The need to be connected is more significant than ever now.
At Sangoma, we recognize this because we see this happening in our company as well. UC has most certainly helped. But there’s been a key ingredient missing. One way to help with overcoming the missing sense of community and human interaction is to utilize video more. Since we started the global WFH for our company in mid-March, we’ve utilized it a lot and its been a big success.
Given what is going on out there around the world we’ve decided to make our video conferencing and collaboration service available for free. We’re simply asking for feedback during this time via filling out a form when the call is over.
Sangoma Meet™ is our video conferencing and collaboration solution. Sangoma Meet is a web-based multi-party (up to 50) video conferencing solution that can be used with any WebRTC compatible browser such as Chrome. Sangoma Meet also fully encrypts its password protected video conferences.
Go to https://meet.sangoma.com to get started. It is a stand-alone service that can be used independently or with our award-winning UC solutions.
We’ll continue to offer it for free for as long as this new normal is normal. No gimmicks or anything – we are just trying to help as we’re all just trying to figure out the best way to stay connected. To be used with your company, your work teams, or even your family.
