Teleworking - Chapter 3

A seminar: using the Internet winter term 97/98 Back to the Seminar - HomePage FIM - Homepage Team members: Wolfgang Höfler Mario Pichler Christoph Panwinkler Interesting Links Teleworking - Links Bibliography		How to succeed in the virtual office
		End users shouldn't have to try very hard. That's the secret to success in telecommuting. Ideally, telecommuting should enable users on remote systems to feel just as if they were on a LAN at the office.
		Speed and ease of use are the two connectivity characteristics that most affect end user perceptions. Our expectations were formed in the office; so if performance is significantly below that norm when we sit down at our home PC or pick up our notebook computer, we're bound to feel frustrated. If we have to perform a lot of extra steps to access files and run applications, we're likely to lose patience as well as productivity.
		Think about what the telecommuter needs to do. To create working environments that are as close as possible to being on an office LAN and that fit within your budget, consider first whether telecommuters are stationary or mobile, their distance from the office, and the frequency and duration of communications. These factors will point you in the general direction of cellular or desktop equipment, dial-up or permanent connections, and telephone-based, ISDN, or frame relay services.
		Someone who uses mostly e-mail and word processing and does occasional file transfers needs a lot less bandwidth than someone who does frequent large file transfers performs compute-intensive functions such as data analysis, or uses highly graphical applications such as electronic publishing and Internet World Wide Web browsers.
		Good telecommuting solutions balance cost with productivity. Be careful not to make decisions based on cost alone; when it comes to telecommuting, productivity is the real issue. How valuable is the work the telecommuter is doing? Over the long run, differences between the costs of various telecommuting solutions are usually far outweighed by the differences in productivity they produce.