josher89 wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2020 12:45 pm
This is my third week (in the last five weeks) working from home. My partner and I alternate weeks at home. The biggest challenge is trying to perform comparisons on a small laptop screen at home versus two widescreen monitors at work. We are doing it, but it's just more time-consuming.
That's a primary thing I hear from most people who normally work from an office for whatever work they do - it's just not as efficient. The same goes with us. We're doing 2 office/2 WFH per week, but also have a lot more LPEs.
Caseload has actually increased for us but we are still fortunate to have a relatively quick TAT. Another challenge is when at home, we use a VPN and Remote Desktop to work. If there is some sort or power spike or drop at work, we lose connection and it takes several minutes to get back up and running - after the power issue gets sorted at work.
We absolutely cannot perform any AFIS work from home so that would be the largest challenge that cannot be overcome. IT's a small price as we can catch up once we're back in the office the following week but it might slow a case down for us when normally, it'd be processed in a more timely manner.
We're also using a VPN and log into our work desktop computers. This allows us to do most things that we can do from our desktop, which now includes running our local AFIS as well as NGI and WIN. Even with a 27" iMac, our remote desktop is limited to 80% of actual at full resolution (of one screen). I can expand to fill screen, but it doesn't up the resolution - just magnifies it. So, more difficult prints can wait until I'm back at the office. We're managing to keep workflow without a backlog for the most part, but that's most likely due to not as many cases being submitted. But I don't have access to those numbers.
Overall, this has taught me that we can work from home if necessary as long as the technology can support it. We are still just a busy as ever and while working from home relies working on copies, it can be done. I'm sure there are components of Acrobat that we aren't fully utilizing (I heard they have something called Portfolio that helps organize multiple PDFs for things like this) and we will likely begin to explore those for future telework if needed.
Funny you mention that - Tony Nguyen and I did a presentation on using Portfolio at the Rhode Island conference. I have no idea if it's still a functioning part of Acrobat, but you could save all sorts of file types within your portfolio. I had used a screen shot of Google maps to make a portfolio that had multiple locations for a crime, with reports, images, etc... samples in each of the "locations." It all got saved into one PDF file, although the native file types were kept. Tony added some 360 images to it.
I can also see that working from home is something that is viable going forward. But for efficiency, I'm not sure if everything done in the office should be duplicated. But one day/week under "normal" circumstances doesn't seem out of the question.
Hope everyone else is remaining safe and healthy!
Now wash your hands and quit touching your face!