Coronavirus; Non-IT Indian firms and SMBs facing teething troubles with ‘work from home’

New Delhi: While it makes perfect sense for IT employees to work from remote locations via video conferencing and collaboration tools seamlessly – especially in the case of tech giants like Google or Microsoft — workers from the non-IT companies and small and medium enterprises (SMBs) are the worst-hit in India as most of them have little or no clue about how these messaging and collaboration tools work amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Small companies — from corporate to education verticals — are scrambling to get their act together as new coronavirus threat has reached their premises, prompting them to send employees home who have age-old laptops, poor network and connectivity with no UPS backups and little knowledge about how to handle group chat and collaboration software like Zoom, Google Hangouts Meet, Microsoft Teams and Flock etc.