COVID-19 update

It’s hard to believe that it has been more than 4 months since COVID-19 first made headlines and just over 10 weeks since a state of emergency was first declared in Victoria.

All of our staff and many of our customers are working 100% from home and while this has brought some challenges the transition has been mostly smooth.  There are a couple of things I want to let you know about.

Ringwood office relocation

Prior to the onset of COVID-19 we had plans to relocate our Ringwood office to a new premises (still within the Ringwood area) toward the end of this year as the new owners of our office building intend to demolish it and re-develop the site with works expected to start in early 2021.

With the COVID-19 restrictions continuing, our office unused and all of our staff working from home I have decided to close our Ringwood office early.  We will open a new office somewhere in or near Ringwood after this awful pandemic is behind us and until that time we will continue to operate from home.

If you have a need to send postal mail to us, please do NOT send mail to our Ringwood address, instead please use our CBD address – Suite 504, 365 Little Collins Street, Melbourne, VIC, 3000 or better still send us an email instead.

COVID-19 safety measures

Sometimes the work that we do and the services that we offer can not be performed remotely, in these circumstances we have established new protocols to protect the safety and well being of our staff and of our customers.  Our new policy states:

• We will maintain physical distancing requirements as per government advice.
• Our technicians will wear disposable gloves while working with your equipment.  If they are moving between computers they will change gloves from one computer to the next.
• Time spent on site will be kept to a minimum, this might mean that some jobs are started on-site but completed remotely.
• Signatures on job sheets are no longer required.
• We are no longer able to take your old equipment away for recycling and/or data destruction.
• If we take any of your computer equipment away for repair we will ask you to thoroughly clean and sanitize the equipment before it is handed over; the equipment will be sanitized again before being returned to you.
• If any of your staff have contracted Coronavirus and have spent time in your office within the previous 14 days of our scheduled site visit you must inform us prior to our visit.

Stock levels returning to normal

Late last year and in to early this year there were some major stock shortages affecting I.T. equipment, particularly new computers, no sooner than that problem had been resolved Coronavirus hit and stock levels continued to be a problem – albeit for different reasons.  I am pleased to say that stock levels and availability for most equipment has returned to normal, we can now supply new computer equipment usually with a turn-around time of 1-3 days.  Webcams are still a rare commodity but some models are still available.  If you need any new computer equipment tell me what you are after and I’ll give you a quote.

Microsoft Teams is proving to be a great success

More and more of our customers are using Microsoft Teams to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues online and I’m certain that this is one software tool that will continue to be hugely popular long after the pandemic is behind us.  If you haven’t yet used Microsoft Teams but want to find out more let me know, we can even arrange a training session for your staff.

Teams can be used for text chat, voice and video chat, screen sharing, remote presentations, file sharing and much more.  Best of all, it is currently free for anyone to use.