Hi Everyone,
I’m the “IT Guy” for a small construction consultation and design firm,
building “green” houses.
Right now we have about 40 people working with us, 10-15 admin &
execs, and about 30 sales people. The company is different in that
*everyone* works from home, so we don’t have a headquarters or
main office. So far we have managed to make due without very much
IT infrastructure or policies.
Right now we are using (outsourced) hosted email, phone/voicemail,
CRM, and webhosting. My concern is that as we grow larger we (or
rather *I*) am going to be crushed under the weight of an increasingly inefficient system. Right now my main duties are setting up email
accounts, CRM accounts, Joomla user accounts, maintaining the
website, and acting as a help-desk.
I’ve thought about using LDAP to host a company-wide address book,
instead of our current phone list, which is updated and emailed periodically. I can link this with our CRM (SugarCRM) and Joomla to
consolidate (or so I assume) account creation. I know LDAP can work
as an address book (like for Outlook for Thunderbird) but can it also
be used to manage lists, like If I wanted to send an email to everyone
on the “Exec” list?
My other problem is that because everyone works from home, I don’t
have any control over the operating environment, like I would have in
an office setting. My question is mainly, how do I provide some level
of consistency between users. What I would really like to do, is be able
to connect everyone to a VPN, and have remote admin access, but only
while they are connect to the VPN. Is this asking too much?
So please give me your wisdom, oh masses. What would you do if you
had to be the IT Manager of a company where everyone worked from
home (even you).