Rewind to the end of February 2020 and we were moving into our brand-new 'bigger and better' office in St John's Innovation Centre. After a fantastic 2019 becoming an AWS specialist partner for IoT and being crowned Cambrigeshire's SME business of the year, this was the fourth move for the ever-expanding GC team and our largest office yet!

Now, well into our second month working from home, this feels like a very distant memory - but all is not lost! Thanks to the software we use to complete our work, adopted long before the pandemic hit, we've been able to smoothly make the transition and continue to deliver our award-winning service to customers directly from our individual houses.

With this in mind, we thought we'd share with you some of the hosted and collaborative solutions we are using which have ensured that our customer's projects have remained uninterrupted . . .

What are we using?

Hangouts Meet, Slack Voice Calls, and Discord - these secure and reliable video-conferencing options allow us to have virtual face-to-face client meetings at all of the usual key project points and our team squad sessions are as productive as ever.

G Suite - we've been using GMail, Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Calendars since the company was founded, so there has been no change in the instant accessibility to all of our contacts, files and plans. 

Atlassian Software Development and Collaboration tools - we use JIRA for agile project management of our customer's projects, Confluence for project docs, meeting notes and decisions and BitBucket for our code.

Amazon Web Services - we use AWS for all of our project hosting and infrastructure needs, with strong security and role-based access we can securely support operations wherever we are.

LucidChart - this provides us with the answer to our visual communication needs, whether for interactive whiteboarding and design, or for sharing content (such as wireframes) with our customers for review and discussion.

FreshDesk - powering our helpdesk and customer support, with agents able to interact from anywhere.

Raising a smile

In addition to all of the business and project-based solutions above, it's important to keep communicating as a team too for the sake of everyone's wellbeing! Slack has long been a part of GC life for instant communication and information sharing, but without us being in the same room, it's become key for keeping that social chat alive and has continued to build team camaraderie.

We've also found a little time to find some new options to have a bit of fun whilst delivering our work from home. A favourite is this one, a Rock, Paper, Scissors Game - the perfect tool for resource allocation! ;)

So, whilst we don't know when we'll be back in our shiny new office, we're certain that there will be no break in our service and we look forward to welcoming our clients in person to GC HQ in future, safer times.