Telecommuting Guide

We appreciate your understanding during the rapidly changing working and teaching environments. IT support across the university are stretched beyond capacity due to the unprecedented situation. Class delivery support remains the top priority at the university. Our hope is that this guide will be able to provide some telecommuting assistance as IT support is exceptionally limited.

Equipment

For telecommuting we recommend using OSU equipment and not your personal computer equipment. There are data security concerns as well as support concerns with using personal equipment. Over time we anticipate being able to provide greater assistance to telecommuting support, but we cannot provide support for personal equipment at all.

Department heads, or a designee should filter all equipment needs and request from their department to Fisher IT. Our teams will reach out to the identified individuals to help get them set up with equipment as resources become available. Laptops are being made available by OSU IT, but it will take time to transport and prepare them for use.

For immediate telecommuting needs, it is permissible to pack up your office desktop to take home if you or your household has the skills to take down and set it up at your home without IT assistance. If you and your department head make that choice, you need to report the Fisher Asset number (yellow tag) to both your department head and helpdesk@fisher.osu.edu. Keep in mind that you will need to set it up near your cable modem/router within reach of an ethernet cord. Most of our desktops do not have wireless capability and we will not be able to assist you with adding that capability.

Internet Access

You need some form of a robust broadband connection for telecommuting to be successful. Wow, Spectrum, and ATT U-verse are some of the local providers and we do not have any recommendations as to which may be better than another.

We do not recommend Café, Restaurant, and library WIFI for telecommuting needs. They are notoriously slow, unreliable, and unsecure.

If you do not have broadband access at home and need to telecommute, please let your department head know. Department heads will work with IT to provide resources.

File Access

The easiest method for file access is to copy anything you may need from your work desktop, U drive, and V drive to Box. All university employees have unlimited storage available to them and it is approved by OSU security for nearly all data and you can share the files easily with any university employee. Sign-up and more information is available at BuckeyeBox.

You can of course connect to the U drive and V drive remotely, but that requires using the VPN as well as configurations to attach to the file shares. It is more complicated and people often forget a step. Instructions for doing this from Windows, Mac, and iPad are available if you choose this option.