Darren and Graeme have both posted up a few stories about the virtual company lifestyle that seems to be evolving at Readify these days.
I had a bit of a chuckle about Darren’s picture showing how we hooked Bill up into the conference call after he had a few problems with Skype. I knew Bill was having problems before the meeting started but the solution worked perfectly 
I was actually late to the conference call because I hadn’t sync’d up my smart phone since the meeting was booked and I had to be politely reminded to attend.
But I didn’t really want to talk about telephony hacks or my lateness to a meeting, rather I really wanted to talk to the concept of a virtual company.
When I joined Readify our internal computing infrastructure was struggling. Wierd stuff would happen to our servers from time to time and they’d just go offline. Most people in the company had the keys to the kingdom (administrator password) and it was pretty much open slather.
A little while later Bill Chesnut joined the team and in some of his idle cycles took responsibility for the infrastructure with a lot of support from both Graeme Armstrong and Dan Green to get it right.
Ever since then there has been precious little unscheduled downtime in the critical systems such as e-mail, VPN and file servinig (well done Bill).
An interesting characteristic of the system we have set up is that no-one has physical access to the system under normal circumstances (Bill does if he is swapping a disk or what have you) as its housed in a data center and everyone gets access to it over the Internet, even from the office in Docklands.
When I am not working on a client-site my preferred virtual office is at Starbucks. While most would question the quality of the coffee I find it good enough for me, and the hot chocolate is really good. There is a power point at several points within the shop and very confortable chairs as well as a few tables here and there.
They actually have an Azure hotspot which I can use an affordable Boingo acount with. We are getting some iBurst cards very shortly which will make us more mobile and help us cope with clients that don’t provide Internet on tap at the desktop.
Its all starting to come together, I probably make two business related Skype calls each day and I’m close to being able to drop my mobile phone plan down a notch.