Overview

Following latest Government guidance, many of our clients are now working from home, or planning to shortly. We hope you are all staying safe and well. We have produced this short guide to explain the various ways that you can work from home with Redbrick case management. You may wish to discuss these options with your IT/hardware provider to decide which option is best for you.

Remote connection optionsTowards the end of this guide are the enterprise level options, the systems and platforms your business may already be using.

However, many clients are not already using these systems and to set them up requires an amount of time and cost that simply may not be viable for your business at the moment. Therefore, we’ve outlined below some more tactical, quicker and lower cost options, which would allow you to access your systems remotely.

Remote desktopIf you have a machine available and switched on in the office and a PC, Mac or iPad at home you can use Remote desktop to connect to your office machine (effectively remote control it from home).

You could use this option to work remotely on your office machine without physically being there.

Depending on your network setup, to do this you may first need to connect to a VPN – which your IT firm would be able to assist you with setting up, if one does not already exist.

Remote control softwareIf you do not have any of the above, there are other technologies that will allow you to remote control your office machine from home including, but not limited to:

Team ViewerLogMeInAnydeskJoin.mePlus many others.

These applications, once set up on your office machine, will allow you to connect remotely from any machine or device in the world.

These are a low effort and easy option to connect, however your firm should consider the licencing cost of these options, should you use them for commercial purposes in the long term.

For single use or short-term options, most of these providers will offer a free version, however you will need to satisfy yourselves in respect of your licensing obligation. Redbrick Solutions do not provide advice on this.

Laptops and home PCsFor those of you with a laptop or a home PC capable of running Redbrick (see minimum specs on our website) a last resort option could be to connect these machines via VPN to your office network.

a) Take home your work laptop and connect to the office via VPN. Ordinarily we’d recommend against this because performance over a VPN will be much slower, however if it’s your only option this is preferable to not being able to access your systems at all.

b) If you do not have a laptop but do have a home PC, Redbrick could assist you (assuming a VPN is in place already) installing and configuring RPM to point to your office server.

This is subject to confirmation from your firms decision maker that you’re happy for employees to access this data on personal devices and remotely.

Other optionsThere are other, more complex, options not covered in this document. Your firm may already be considering one of these options. We are here to assist you in managing your business continuity plans. If you wish to discuss the above options, or anything not covered in this document, please do contact us via the helpdesk support@redbricksolutions.co.uk

If your office infrastructure is based solely on a typical client server basis (as highlighted in red in the technical diagram below), this usually only works if you are in the office, but there are other options available. We would recommend you refer this document to your IT provider.

RDS / terminal serverOne option would be to make use of RDS (previously referred to as Terminal server) systems, where your IT firm has the capacity to set one up.

RDS would allow you to connect remotely from any machine to a desktop environment that mirrors your internal setup and therefore allows you to access Redbrick and your other systems.

If you do not already have a RDS environment, it’s worth noting that this option would require some significant setup and would come with licencing costs which your IT firm would be better placed to investigate based on your individual usage and requirements.

The suitability of this option would also depend on your hardware setup and its capacity, again a good question for your IT provider.

Citrix – desktop and published appMuch like RDS, Citrix XenApp allows your IT firm to deploy either a fully hosted desktop environment or just publish certain applications that you need remote access to, e.g. Redbrick.

Should you choose to just publish the Redbrick application you would also need to publish – SDLT, MS Office (inc. Outlook) in order for the full functionality to be available.

Like RDS this is an enterprise level solution and has licencing costs from Citrix. It would also be dependent on your capacity and hardwares ability to run it.

Third party hosting systemsThe two above options require you to host the services on your hardware, but there are also many cloud platform providers in the market who can host it for you.

Redbrick work with a number of these firms already and would recommend IT Farm https://www.itfarm.co.uk/. We also have clients working in a number of other environments, including but not limited to: Acuutech, Green Cloud and Azure.

SupportThese are uncertain times, but rest assured we are here to support you. Our helpdesk team are operating as normal and can be contacted via email support@redbricksolutions.co.uk or telephone 01572 770088 between the hours of 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday.