Subject: During the Covid pandemics in 2020-2022, our development office in Vietnam experienced the same trauma as the rest of the world in dealing with health issues, restrictive quarantine environment, challenging food and medical supply, and difficult communication. This article highlights the tools that we developed, along with Microsoft Teams platform, to keep working and collaborate while fighting the virus.

In late 2019, the world struggled with the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) which causes millions of deaths and paralyzed most of the economics as countries imposed tight restrictions on movement to halt the spread of virus. During the period from 2019 to 2021, Appvity office in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam experienced multiple waves of pandemic from the Delta to Omicron variants.

Vietnam was one of the countries that fare well during the pandemic. Earlier in the pandemic, the country was on high alert and its tracking and communication policy helps to prevent a much more dire situation. When Omicron variant arrive in early 2022, the country was well vaccinated and again, was able to withstand the onslaught of this horrific virus.

Even so, there was periods where strict quarantine rules were affecting many businesses. In 2021, the city was under quarantine for 5 months, where our office was closed, and our team was forced to work from home during this time. Members of our team helped each other during this difficult period in locating food, medical supplies, household items, as well as information to keep everyone healthy and informed. At the end, 90% of our employees ended up infected with the virus, with most of the cases happened when Omicron variant was spreading. Fortunately, all our cases were mild, with no one require hospital care or suffer major medical issue.

Along with fighting the pandemics, like other high-tech companies, we looked for ways to connect everyone online, allow us to continue hold meetings, discussions, and to track our work. We were able to maintain high level of productivity during this time, and the tools that helped were the tools that we have been using for a few years already: Microsoft Teams, emails, and our own product eTask. These tools are important for us to use in our normal time, and was essential during the restrictive period, and will be important step for future, “new normal” work offices.

Communication and collaboration via Teams

One of the top trusted tools we used to collaborate is Microsoft Teams, which provides video conference, calls, chats, and work together effectively. Teams ensures the security, reliable streaming quality, and allows tons of applications to work within its framework to keep everyone connected with one another. Teams keeps our members stay connected while Appvity eTask app help our project managers to manage daily works and maintain our productivity. There is a tremendous advantage in being able to manage daily works via list, Kanban board, or charts, while collaborate with team members via chats, posts, and meetings. Even with your partners outside of your organization, without switching to any other app. Absolutely a winner!

Eat your own dog food

While Teams provided the backbone for us to collaborate, such as setting up online meetings and post daily report in each channel for different project, the ability to track tasks and issues via eTask is also essential for us. eTask is Appvity’s first commercial product that manage tasks and bugs. It is under development and the pandemic provides perfect opportunity for us to put this product under real world beta test. We struggled at first because everyone did not quite adapt to the new situation. But as the pandemic’s days pass on, all Appvity members becomes an expert in using eTask and Teams while being remote. The experience is unique, and somewhat surreal. We gathered and consolidated many ideas to enhance future versions of the application.

Like many, it was a period that will not easily be forgotten. We were happy to survive the pandemic while be able to find ways to adapt and keep our team working together. It is not only the virus that adapts, so are we.