The New Mobility

So - we were in the office this morning and about 1/2 hour after we started working the power went out. For the whole building.

After the initial mill-about-the-hallway with the other tenants, and after exhausting all the coffee in the office - we decided it was time for plan B.

We all have laptops in the office - so besides our couple of internal servers on UPS, no work was lost - but it's hard to run a software company without power. So, we did the next best thing - we went to our local coffee shop that has free WiFi (in fact, that's where I am now).

Yes, I know the horror stories of compromised WiFi spots that I previously reported - but we needed to get a couple of important things done.

So we grabbed our laptops, cell phones and power adapters and packed into a couple of cars (mine is "trapped" in the underground garage) and headed down the block to Coffee 'n Dreams. By the time our coffees were ready, we were all online and on the phone - just like in the office.

We switched our internal phone system to a virtual PBX a few months ago - so all we had to do was go to a web page and re-direct the calls to our cell phones and customers can still call us just like "normal."

We could access our web mail servers, surf, blog, and even access our own Servoy-based internal system - just like in the office. It's pretty cool, actually.

Thank God we chose Servoy for our internal system! It's got a SSL connection between the server and the client - so even over a public WiFi all of our data is automatically encrypted and we can work at the same access speed we're used to (fast!).

Even 3 years ago what we're doing now would have been pretty advanced. I guess most people do this kind of mobile work on a routine basis. I know for me - it's one of the first times that I've had to rely on a plan B implementation for getting work done. It's nice to know that our Business Continuation Plan really, actually, works.

Maybe I should just ditch the office altogether.

I gotta' go - we just got a call that the power is back on...