By Lee Zweig

A recent poll by GP Online has shown that 63% of GP’s think that some degree of home working will remain after the pandemic is over, given there are some clear benefits - both short and long term. 

by Tom Goldsworthy

With the seismic shift to home working in 2020, the benefits of cloud solutions such as Teams, Zoom and other collaboration applications have shown brightly. But this has been less true for cloud voice platforms.

By Dan Rue

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 in early 2020, general practices have seen the long standing challenges they face magnified and have had entirely new challenges thrown upon them. One such challenge is finding a phone system that meets the needs of both patients and staff who may not be able (or allowed) to physically come into the practice. 

by Lucy Antunes

Christmas is just around the corner now, and what a year this has been. With seemingly endless lockdowns and constant working from home, most of us have found us in situations we would never have dreamed of a year ago.  

By Lee Zweig

With winter coming and local lockdowns popping up all over the country, the likelihood of staff needing to isolate, or even practice closures, is increasing.  Fortunately, technology is here to help. Staff can work from home as effectively (or close to) if they have the right tools.  

Business continuity planning emerged from disaster recovery planning in the early 1970s. Financial organisations, such as banks and insurance companies began the trend by ensuring they had data backed up at protected sites. Recovery efforts were almost always triggered by a fire, flood, storm or other physical devastation.

With the rise in working-from-home, many of us are now using softphones - which has lots of benefits.  Users can make and receive calls from their work number, transfer calls, conference calls, and talk as long as they want without using mobile minutes. But what many people working from home forget, is that soft phones are only as good as the WiFi and broadband they are connected to. And with demands on domestic broadband greater than ever between email, CRM systems and video, the competition for bandwidth can be fierce. 

Usually patients are limited in their ability to lodge a complaint to directly to their surgery. They can 1) speak to the receptionist, 2) write a feedback card 3) email a general surgery address, or 4) fill out text/online questionnaires.

But what  about a call recording system?

You may have read recently that Zoom is going to start offering video conferencing hardware, as-a-service - meaning companies can pay monthly to rent state-of-the art equipment for only a small fraction of the cost to buy it. Companies benefit from the latest technology, completely supported, without a full fledged investment into devices that will no doubt be out-dated in a few years; and Zoom benefits by bringing its services to the office as people just as people start working from home less.

Even as lockdown measures are eased and retail businesses re-open, the B2B world remains sceptical about a return to the office. Most office-based businesses expect to be fully or partly working from home for some time, and as such there will be a continued increase in demand for remote working and digital collaboration technology in months if not years to come.