My Own Workspace – Jeroen Bastiaansen
Jeroen Bastiaansen – UC&C Ambassador at Communicativ
From my position at Communicativ I have a lot of customer contact and I get a lot of questions about collaboration in mainly the Netherlands and Belgium. You could just call me a real “road warrior” and this while I prefer not to be in the car at all.
I am often asked how and with which tools I perform my work. Let me take you here. While driving in the car you can of course make hands-free calls. The safety of this can be disputed, but I find it particularly inefficient. Moreover, such a conversation often lacks the required content such as a quote, design or project overview. In any case, driving to an appointment or office is unnecessary in many cases. In my case, I live in a beautiful village south of Breda, while my colleagues are in the office in Almere or Brussels. In both cases it is not really a party to face those traffic jams on the respective A27 and E19.
In addition to the many appointments at customers, I also regularly work from home. The mornings are my favorite moment because the children are in school. In the afternoon things can get stormy at my house. It is then important to find a quiet place. At my home workplace I use a double-ear headset from Jabra, the Engage 75. This has the great advantage that the charging / base station is connected with USB to my Surface Pro and via Bluetooth to my mobile. From the charging / base station to the headset, the connection is DECT and I can theoretically walk 150 meters away from my workplace. Handy if the children are around.
If I am not at my home office but, for example, visiting Microsoft or a customer, I also use a Jabra headset, but now the Evolve 75, a Bluetooth device. Both headsets have a perfect noise reduction, which is nice for “the other side of the line”. In my car I use a Sennheiser Presence, a so-called earpiece with perfect noise reduction that is much better than my car kit. My calls from the car are not perceptible for “the other side of the line”, which I find quite a key feature. Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I prefer not to call in the car.
However, the application that has the most positive impact on my daily work is Microsoft Teams. With Microsoft Teams I work on projects together with colleagues, partners and customers. In these projects we share information, hold meetings, and above all we do NOT email. We always look with the team to up-to-date files (Teams is a shell over SharePoint online) and all information is always and everywhere available. On my Microsoft Surface Pro, on my iPhone but of course also for my chain partners outside my organization. Because the chat is ‘persistent’, team members can always read the chats they have missed when it suits them. For the same reason, I always record project meetings (camera images, shared information, presentations, etc.) for later reference work. Microsoft Teams is also my fixed telephony client and since the internet is available just about everywhere (possibly via 4G), the quality of the telephone calls is also guaranteed.
For the above mentioned activities I use the following (personal) products and applications on a daily basis:
• Microsoft Surface Pro 5
• Microsoft Surface Go LTE (extra device for Teams voice demos)
• Office365 E5 including:
– Teams Cloud Phone system
– DirectRoute + account with an international calling plan (own Communicativ product)
– PSTN Conferencing for calling in at meetings
iPhone 7 with my most used apps:
• Outlook
• Teams
Headset for daily use: Jabra Evolve 75 Stereo and Jabra Engage 75 Stereo
Headset for the car: Sennheiser Presence