M+E Daily

BeBop Technology Offers Remote Work Insights

To keep the industry working when remote is needed, what are some of the best practices needed to make that happen?

That’s the question BeBop Technology is tackling in a series of new webinars on remote collaboration, the first of which — “Working From Home Securely: Best practices for M&E” — was held March 11, with Michael Kammes, director of business development for BeBop, and Brian Bedell, the company’s customer success specialist, weighing in.

“A lot of us are going to be working remotely, and we need to provision for working remote, in the best interest of the creative community at large,” Kammes said. “There are a lot of ways to do that.”

The priorities for any remote working situation need to address security, usability, organization and collaboration, prefereably in that order, Kammes said. “When you’re working at a creative facility, and you’re working with creatives, you’re behind a firewall, he said. But when you’re working from home, that level of security often doesn’t exist, requiring remote workers to be extra cautious.

Usability and organization are key in that the tools used at home vs. at the office may require concessions on how you get your job done. And collaboration can be made more difficult, with the inability to turn to the person at the next desk in the office.

“We need to learn how to adapt what we’re used to working with,” Kammes said. “When you get to disaster recovery, you may not have the exact same tool set as you had prior. We have to accept that there’s going to be a protracted learning curve, an expectation that there are going to be things done a little bit differently.”

For security, keep an eye on how secure your storage and OS is. For usability, familiarize yourself with at-home software as quickly and completely as possible, to both be more comfortable working with it, and to figure out disaster recovery, should that be needed. For organization, look for access to media asset management (MAM) systems available, and prepare multiple levels of back-ups, to ensure the right media is getting where it needs to go.

And to replicate the collaborative tools, seek to emulate what you’d use in the office in the areas of file exchange, video and audio conferencing, shared storage, and review and approve.

There are multiple ways of easing the transition to remote work: remote creatives armed with local drives; extended remote desktop offerings; or look to the cloud to facilitate, Kammes said.

“Do you have your firewall turned on? Is the firmware on your router updated? That needs to be checked,” he said.