Remote Worker Experience
Overview
The Remote Working Experience Pack enables you to manage the experience of your remote workforce. Whether working remotely out of choice or necessity, the digital experience of the remote worker is vital as their isolation makes them completely dependent on their digital devices.
The pack has a number of dashboards, categories, metrics, and campaigns but note that these are an out-of-the-box configuration and customers are absolutely free to configure the pack as they wish, details of how to do this are in this article.
The pack gives you a readiness-assessment of your infrastructure to ensure that your employees are able to successfully stay productive and collaborate with their colleagues, whether remotely or in the office. The pack covers a number of aspects, such as software presence, encryption status, and whether a VPN authentication certificate is present.
The pack will allow IT teams to monitor, manage, and report on their employees' digital experience and by taking both technical and sentiment metrics into account, it will provide complete employee-centric infrastructure visibility. It monitors the usage of the remote connection so that the network traffic can be optimized and forewarns of impending user experience issues such as passwords soon to expire.
In particular, the pack focuses on the device readiness and configuration and the success of Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, and Zoom. (If your organization does not use these tools, then the appropriate dashboards and metrics can be removed).
The pack comes with Sentiment campaigns for both IT Topics, such as Service Outage and IT Satisfaction along with HR-centric campaigns on items such as Employee Well-being.
You can also detect the Wi-Fi signal strength for the remote devices and a self-help campaign can assist the employee in getting better Wi-Fi reception.
There is a dashboard on the compliance of your remote Office 365 ProPlus devices. This is particularly useful in the concept of Remote Working because patching and staying up to date is more complex when you are outside the Office networks so we have taken the key parts of the Office 365 ProPlus pack and added it into Remote Worker, but keeping the focus on your remote workforce.
Platforms Supported
Additional optional library packs
There are additional packs on the Nexthink Web Library that can be used in addition to the Remote Worker Experience Pack to enhance the view of Remote Workers even more:
L1 and L1 Advanced Checklists – these have been updated to include various checks pertinent to remote workers such as VPN and Firewall being present, collaboration tools being installed, the Wifi signal strength, and key items such as impending password expiration which can have an increased impact on remote workers due to their distant proximity to physical support staff.
Windows Defender Management – This pack now includes greater detail and a breakdown of its metrics for Remote workers versus Office workers.
Device Compliance - this pack has been upgraded in two aspects. Firstly, the Remote Worker view has been added as a breakdown so that on all dashboards a breakdown is given by worker type to help you understand where your workers are in the context of each dashboard. Secondly, there is a significant update to the Software Compliance dashboards which allow you to configure any piece of software at any version level and Nexthink will report your corporate compliance level in regards to it.
If you wish to download or upgrade to the latest version of the above packs, feel free to do this outside the activities below which are covering the core Remote Worker pack configuration.
Pre-Requisites
The Remote Worker Experience pack refers to Digital Experience Scores in some of its dashboards, therefore the Digital Experience Score pack should be installed before installing the Remote Worker Experience pack. This pack is macOS enabled so if you want to target macOS machines you must ensure that the Digital Experience Score for macOS pack and macOS Content Pack have been installed as they are needed for macOS compatibility.
Change log & Upgrade Process
If you are upgrading from an earlier version of a library pack follow this link to read about the upgrade process from a version of a Library Pack to the next one.
Follow this link to read about the Change log of the Remote Worker library pack.
Configuration
The pack requires some level of configuration so that it can correctly identify remote workers. These configuration steps should be set to the values relevant to your organization before using the pack so that the results are accurate.
Because of the multiple possibilities in the configuration of Remote Workers, it is also possible to amend metrics, this will also be covered.
User category "Remote Worker vs Office Worker"
Use this category if you wish to identify users as remote workers by assigning this manual category. To use, simply create an investigation of all users you wish to categorize as remote and set the keyword so that they are categorized as the "Remotely Connected Worker".
Device category "Remote Worker vs Office Worker Device"
This category is used by multiple library packs. Please go to its dedicated configuration page for more information about it.
Device category "Remote Worker Readiness"
This category should be configured to describe the types of devices that remote workers will be using, using whatever criteria you wish. During the execution of the pack, in the readiness assessment dashboards, these criteria are used so that only the readiness of devices that match the criteria wished are reported on. For example, should you just use laptops for remote workers, then the "Remote Worker Devices Type" tag within the category can be set to just laptop. Likewise, if you are using Desktops and Laptops in the office, then "Office Worker Devices Type" can be set to Laptop or Desktop. It is entirely possible to have more than one entry for each tag should you use laptops, desktops, virtual desktops, or other configurations for your workforce.
Package categories "Firewall / AV / Other Packages" and "VPN Packages"
These three categories define packages that you wish to look for in the pack. The Packages should be present on a remote working before it is considered compliant and ready for remote working. It is entirely possible to customize these entries to match the requirements of your organization, the default values hold commonly used applications.
Executable categories "Firewall / AV / Other Executables" and "VPN Executables"
These three categories hold the equivalent executables for the earlier Package based categories. This is needed because although we can look for installations with categories if we wish to list version dispersions and so forth we need to go to the executable level. Once again, full customization is possible, change the entries as you wish to match any particular executables you wish to track.
Domain category "Unwanted Domains"
This optional category holds any domain or domain category that you either simply want to track or do not want users to be using. The associated metrics do not stop users visiting these domains, Nexthink cannot do this. However, it reports on the data volumes going to them.
Package categories "ProPlus Required Version" and "ProPlus Version"
The Remote Worker pack provides a dashboard showing you the key information regarding Office 365 ProPlus. This information is largely taken from Nexthink's Office 365 ProPlus pack and these Categories, while included in the Remote Worker pack, are simply references to the categories found in the ProPlus pack - therefore if you have already imported the ProPlus pack, no configuration is necessary. If you have not imported the ProPlus pack and would like to see the core information around patching and DEX when it comes to Office 365 ProPlus for your remote workforce, then these two categories should be configured.
"ProPlus Required Version" - The dashboard is entirely flexible in terms of what versions of ProPlus you wish to monitor. By configuring this Category you are describing which version(s) of ProPlus you wish to monitor. This category should contain the version number(s) you would like to achieve across your remote ProPlus landscape. Note that any version number can be added and multiple versions can be used (for different ProPlus branches). Details on ProPlus version history is published by Microsoft.
ProPlus Version - this should contain all the versions of ProPlus which you currently support within your Organization, configured in the same way as the above-Required Version Category.
Destination category "Update Servers"
The Windows 10 portion of Remote Worker Experience has indicators as to whether devices have received traffic from update servers, which can reveal any change in Digital Experience soon after updates are received.
To support this, the "Update Servers" category has been created, which should be populated with the names of your update servers, normally SCCM Distribution Points within your environment.
Campaigns
The pack also contains five Campaigns, which can be used as wished.
Satisfaction Campaign
This Campaign is intended for continuous feedback on Remote Working experience. Examine the Campaign details in terms of the title and description amending as wished. When ready, publish the Campaign. It is targeted at the Investigation "Remote Worker Experience - Users working from home" so when published this Investigation will be evaluated and continue to be so every 10 minutes following. The Campaign is configured so that recipients will get the Campaign once every month.
Information Campaign
This Campaign is intended to update remote workers (or any targeted users) with informational updates of any sort. This could be a news update regarding a hot topic within the company, a reminder on some best practices, it really is anything you wish to put into it. When ready, publish the Campaign. It is targeted at the Investigation "Remote Worker Experience - Safety measures audience" so when published this Investigation will be evaluated and continue to be so every 10 minutes following.
Service Outage
This campaign is particularly aimed at quickly informing people of service outages or degradations. When connected remotely it can be frustrating if services go offline, so this campaign allows the quick delivery of service status messages. The pack includes a campaign targeted for Microsoft Teams. However, this can be modified to cover any service name.
Well-being Campaign
This Campaign is aimed at the well-being of employees from a non-IT perspective. While working remotely it is important not just to track the technical side of the employee experience but also their overall happiness and satisfaction with their remote working experience. The campaign is targeted at Remote Workers by default.
Get Wi-Fi Signal Strength
This Campaign is launched when the Remote Action "Get Wifi Signal Strength" is launched against a remote device. The WiFi network at the remote destination is measured and should it be below a certain threshold (one of the input parameters) then it will launch this Campaign, which is self-help for the user. We encourage you to modify the Campaign with any self-help tips that you would like to bring in for your Organization. The Campaign also asks the User whether the tips were useful so it brings an understanding as to whether the tips being offered are of use.
Metric Modification
The metrics to track software installation and uninstallation use a particular mechanism. Within the Readiness assessment branch of the metrics, you will see that the criteria are looking for the presence of either a single package or multiple packages. If it's a single package, you can simply change the package name in the relevant category and the metric will look for the new name. if you wish to add more criteria, for example, say you wish to look for the presence of five packages, the key is to add the additional criteria using the existing logic of "Package...<Category>...is...<Item>" but note that in the "and" section further down, the total number of packages you are looking for should be incremented: If you are looking for five packages, this should be updated to five and so on.
Customers are actively encouraged to tune the metrics testing if the certificate pair is valid. For example, removing the Private certificate check if that is not relevant to their setup.
This ultimately means full flexibility: for any of the categories in the pack you can have as many packages or executables you want and you can amend the metric criteria accordingly if you wish to search for more packages or executables being present before considering the device compliant.