First day under COVID-19 lock-down in Austria (16. March'20)

In order to reduce corona infections in Austria we are under lockdown, meaning everybody should stay at home except working in a critical business, buy food and drugs or help others. At this moment we have 1018 people infected and 3 dead.

As IT company we can switch pretty easy to home office. Communication is now based on Microsoft Teams and Email. We have clear rules for home office. Sign-in and Sign-out in our Shop Floor Control System, phone, email and Teams has to be enabled. We have set up a seperate company Team to group all employees at home in virtual office.

We’re utilizing our cloud services like Office365, Remote Desktop Service Hosts, VPN and Facebook as well for instant communication. I’ve also summarized the options today in an email to my colleagues. Although there are reports that Teams is facing issues because of the high usage, I didn’t recognize problems in Teams today.

Many articles regarding home office suggest to make a clear break between private and working time. If decided to use my Surface environment (Laptop, Keyboard, Mouse) for work and my Desktop PC for private time.

Cooking and lunch is done at home, and is far not so much fun like in the office. Especially withouth the office dog Meggie.

Public transport is still operating, but the tramway is almost empty (as it should be). Borders are closed for regular travellers, only trucks and business travel ist allowed. Most passenger flights from and to Linz airport are cancelled, freight is still operating.

Let’s see how the rest of the week will be. Someone posted this today on facebook: