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ZDNet UK at the National Museum Of Computing

We have arrived! The advance guard of myself and Charles McLellan safely installed, ZDNet UK is now live from The National Museum Of Computing at Bletchley Park.
Written by Rupert Goodwins, Contributor

We have arrived! The advance guard of myself and Charles McLellan safely installed, ZDNet UK is now live from The National Museum Of Computing at Bletchley Park.

Here's what we've learned so far about remote team working.

1. The Tyranny Of Leads. Enough power cables? Enough power sockets? Enough phone cables? The right USB adators? Even when your entire computing environment is on a laptop and nominally self-contained, you will need a lot of extra bits that normally just fade into the background of daily work. And then you will forget to take them with you when you set up shop elsewhere. It would be sensible to keep a go bag with all the basics somewhere offsite, but don't forget to check it for any new requirements. And you can't have enough multiway power adaptors.

2. Wi-Fi is always a bit more complicated than you expect. Like most organisations of any size, TNMOC has a variety of Wi-Fi gateways with a variety of permissions and capability. The most important device in the building is currently the small piece of paper with the right access credentials, which were determined after a short period of empirical testing marked by cries of "Try upper case" and "I don't think Windows likes that access point." Wi-Fi is pernickety, something we tend to forget once it's working properly at home or the office. Where possible, get your access sorted out beforehand, while you're not in the middle of a crisis or a deadline. Nothing comes as more of a relief than your laptop turning on, spotting a hotspot it knows about and getting connected in seconds.

3. Yes, the cloud works. At least so far - as (nearly) all our corporate systems are accessible through the browser and we're Google Apps users, once we had power and net access getting on with actual work was the easiest part f the move.

4. Coffee. Same rule as multiway power adaptors.

More later - Charles is currently sighing over banks of BBC micros, there's a Raspberry Pi to explore, and a Surface active table running Domesday that's begging to be explored.

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