Dealing with Covid19
The last however many weeks has been unprecedented and on a personal note I wish to thank ALL our clients who have been amazing as we systematically moved them to new locations and helped with their continuity plans. Like the whole industry, we have seen hiatuses, cancellations, postponements and a VERY large number of all your houses, your pets and your families as we installed systems EVERYWHERE!
As that awful combination of words, the ‘new normal’, starts to bed in i thought i would share with you some of the things Salon have done since March and some of the plans we have going forward.
Staff:
Our staff are the backbone of the company, we are incredibly lucky to have such a fantastic hard working and talented bunch of people in the team and when the industry started to go into ‘get out of town’ overdrive, our team moved rapidly and worked all hours to get people relocated to their homes. Like a military operations our logistics team used maps, whiteboards and plenty of coffee to work out the fastest and most efficient routes around the UK for each of our vans loaded with multiple systems, it was a daily routine of hearing ‘Right Bristol Team Go! Avid 1 – 10am, Avid 2 – 11am…London Team Go!…’ as they strove to install more systems in a week than we usually do in a few months!
We made a strong commitment early on to make sure the team were looked after through all of this. A special Covid-19 bonus was given out to all staff plus deliveries of the essentials like wine & beer (oh and veg boxes) despatched to team members houses during lockdown to keep them in high spirits! In addition, for those staff working from home, we have purchased desks where required and put comfy Aeron chairs in.
Free Support for ALL the industry:
On March 20th we launched a free online site peopleinpost.com offering anyone who needed tech support during the crisis a place they could go to. Our engineers are online everyday to respond and have so far helped a large number of people with questions from ‘what plugs in where’ to more complicated ones regarding errors and software complications. We have had some lovely feedback and we shall continue this service for the foreseeable to help as many people as we can.
Broadcast article: https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/tech/free-tech-support-for-post-production-staff-at-home/5148490.article
Remote Working:
Our tech team had been working on remote solutions well before this crisis took hold but it’s obvious to say things have been a little fast tracked in recent weeks! As it looks more and more like the industry may change significantly for the medium term at the very least we have been working on a variety of ways to keep our clients cutting. We are very conscious that one size certainly does not fit all and as such have collated a number of solutions which now all sit under the SalonCloud portfolio.
These include traditional technology like Teradici and HP RGS PCoIP technology as well as virtualised machines. However, we also found that these technologies are great in many situations but in others they just aren’t suitable therefore we put together some of our own solutions so as to cover all scenarios.
One of these is SalonSync which you can read about here. In short, it’s a system where editors work off local media but our system keeps it in sync across multiple locations really fast. People have been doing this for years BUT our solution is a bit more advanced and fully managed. It features accelerated file transfer and has ZERO housekeeping requirements, everything happens in the background and does not affect the user one bit. We can also add shared projects with bin locking too.
The system is already in use with a large UK production company. We’d love to talk to you about this as well as our other solutions, we are confident we can find the best fit for your production.
Going back to work
Our teams have been working throughout the crisis albeit remotely from their homes but now as we see a gradual move back to daily operations we have put a strict covid-19 policy in place, including PPE (with some lovely handmade facemasks from @hannahloveslondon) , to ensure clients and staff remain safe.
A copy of our summarised policy is available here.
The UK industry is strong and we will get through it together, if anyone has any questions about remote working, wants to discuss a future project and how we can help or just fancies a catch up, we are here, we are open and we are Salon, supporting you wherever you choose to be.
All the best,
Nick Long – Managing Director (right sporting a new Salon facemask!)
