The slim office

By anal­ogy with the thin client in com­put­ing, I pro­pose the idea of a “slim office”.

A slim office is a way of set­ting up work­places in which any employee can do all of their work at any com­puter, because all the data and tools live “in the cloud”, that is, on the servers of var­i­ous ser­vices, and are avail­able through a browser.

Here’s my experience. I’ve moved my small office almost entirely to the slim format.

The work com­put­ers hold no doc­u­ments, data­bases or any­thing else that mat­ters to the business. None at all. For work, employ­ees use the Google Chrome browser, the Google Apps tools (Gmail, Drive, Docs and Sheets), and OpenOffice Calc for very large spreadsheets. For phones, a vir­tual PBX with soft­phones (phone software).

Every busi­ness system is SaaS: order track­ing and pro­cess­ing, CRM, busi­ness processes, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, all in cloud services. As excep­tions, some files are kept in Dropbox when there’s no better place for them.

We have no real paper­work to speak of, given the com­pany’s small size. So there are no prob­lems with paper either. What’s left is moving our con­tracts with part­ners to elec­tronic form. But that depends little on what I want.

Why is this better than an ordinary office?

1. At any moment, any employee can start work­ing from another com­puter, even a brand-new one. The switch takes less than half an hour (install a browser and an office suite, sync the Chrome account). This can be useful when hard­ware breaks or is con­fis­cated by incom­pe­tent author­i­ties. I’ve heard more than once how a raid by polite men in masks par­a­lyzed a whole com­pany for at least sev­eral days by taking away its com­put­ers and servers. Are you ready for that?
2. The safety and secu­rity of the data is guar­an­teed by the rep­u­ta­tion of the ser­vices we use. Their backup and data pro­tec­tion sys­tems are by def­i­n­i­tion better than any of mine, since that is their core business.
3. By moving to cloud ser­vices instead of desk­top appli­ca­tions and run­ning your own servers, you get all the advan­tages that come with SaaS: reli­a­bil­ity, guar­an­teed data safety, trans­par­ent infor­ma­tion, con­ve­nient access any time from any­where, high speed and so on.
4. If your employ­ees don’t use spe­cial­ized desk­top soft­ware that only runs on Windows, you can save on oper­at­ing system licenses and use a free OS. Ubuntu, for example.

Weak spots of the slim office

How to store passwords

The main bot­tle­neck, as I see it, is the secu­rity of employ­ees’ account passwords. To solve it I use the LastPass pass­word manager. For a long time we did with­out one, like everybody. But believe me, if you don’t solve pass­word stor­age for your employ­ees, they’ll write them on scraps of paper and pin them up some­where in the office for all to see. That doesn’t strike me as the best approach. Does it strike you as one?

I’ll write a separate post on pass­word security.

You need a stable internet connection

Obviously, a stable inter­net con­nec­tion is now crit­i­cal for things to work. If before you could do some things offline, now far less is possible. You may have to pay for a reli­able plan, and it’s prob­a­bly worth adding a backup line from another provider.

As it turned out, this can cause some headaches even in a civ­i­lized city of a mil­lion people. The busi­ness center where I rent the office has only one inter­net provider. Sadly, that’s typ­i­cal of shop­ping and busi­ness cen­ters in Ukraine, since the man­age­ment gets a kick­back from the provider for the “exclusive”.

I real­ize that not every­one can set up a slim office. Especially medium and large businesses. But for a small one it’s well within reach. You just have to stop fear­ing the myth­i­cal loss of data. It’s you, or any of your employ­ees, who is more likely to lose impor­tant data, since you lack the spe­cial­ized knowl­edge and habits to store it safely. And I’m sure many com­pa­nies could save a lot and stream­line their processes by moving their tools “to the cloud”.