Here are some of the tools we use to work remotely and how to successfully move from an office to a distributed team working from home.

Working from home to flatten the curve

With the gobal outbreak of Covid-19, also known as Coronavirus, we see that normal life becomes heavily impacted. These actions are necessary to ensure that the number of victims don’t outweigh the capacity of our healthcare institutes. This action by governments is now referred to as the Flatten The Curve approach.

Flatten the Curve or why we need to spread the infections over a longer period of time.

The best way to slow down the spread of this virus is to keep people at home as much as possible. In Belgium, the government has taken action to prevent a critical outbreak: closing schools, restaurants, cultural and social locations and cancelling all public and private events.

Our Belgian government also demanded businesses to have their employees and contractors work from home (WFH) as much as possible.

Management, administration, public relations and most of IT can be done from wherever there’s an internet connection. And why not? Most of the office suites like Microsoft Office 365 or Google Suite are cloud based and offer a wide selection of tools you can use to be productive and are great for working from home.

Google G-Suite offers well integrated office tools that makes working from home easy.
Online collaboration suite by Google: G-Suite

Development tools

For developers life there are platforms like GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab where online collaboration is made possible by providing version control as a service.

Online SCM services like GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab enable devlopers to collaborate online.
GitHub, BitBucket and GitLab are the most used online collaboration platforms

Business operation tools

Project management, customer relation managment and enterprise resource planning can now also be provided as a service. Platforms like Basecamp, Atlassian Tools, Phabricator, Salesforce, Zoho One and HubSpot are some great examples of online business applications.

A collection of business applications provided as an online service that are great for working from home.
Just a collection of online business applications

Communication tools

For communications there are so many options out there it’s impossible to list them all. We are fans of Slack and Zoom for online communications as they are easy to use and integrate with all the other services we use.

Slack and Zoom for online communications.
Slack and Zoom for communications

References for working from home

Our company is already works completely remote. The current situation doesn’t have much of an impact on us. But if you are a “new” remote worker we understand you have many, many questions.

Below you will find a list of some interesting articles about remote work, written by experienced organizations with remote teams:

A final thought

Even though we should remain in self-isolation as much as possible, this period of isolation can be very challenging to people around you. Help others in your neighborhood where you can, even if it’s just getting an extra loaf of bread from the bakery.


Michelangelo van Dam

Michelangelo van Dam is a senior PHP architect, PHP community leader and international conference speaker with many contributions to PHP projects and community events.