AUSTIN, TEXAS - Since 1996, Austin's city government has looked to telework as a means to improve air quality by decreasing vehicular emissions. But budget and technology constraints kept its program from taking flight. Because Austin lacked the funds to provide laptops or workstations for the employees' home offices, IT struggled with how to fashion teleworkers' home PCs into stable and secure remote workstations.

"For years we've made some attempts, tried different approaches, the same story as everyone else," says Brownlee Bowmer, CIO of Austin's Information Services Department (ISD).

But last year, Austin's telework initiative got a double shot in the arm. The city received an $86,000 grant from the state energy conservation office to develop its telework program. Bowmer's security team now could test a number of newer remote-access technologies and develop an intranet site promoting telework, and the city could hire a telework program manager, Wendy Frizzell, to market the program and provide telework training.

In the end, Bowmer's network security team selected Expertcity's GoToMyPC as its primary method for connecting remote workers to the office. Today, 300 Austin teleworkers in a variety of agencies use it to access their corporate desktops via their home PCs, while another hundred or so use traditional VPN, dial-up or Citrix Metaframe to connect to the city's network. Austin's goal is to have 1,000 teleworkers by mid-2005, most using GoToMyPC.

Most Austin teleworkers work from home one day per week. Many use telework to avoid coming in on the weekends, and a small number telework several days or even full time from home. Many work in ISD, the city clerk's office, city manager's office and emergency medical services department.

Although improving air quality is the program's prime driver, Frizzell finds telework benefits city workers with special needs. "We've had very good success with people on maternity leave who extend their time at home by teleworking 20 hours per week before returning to the office. We also use it for a handful of workers who are ill with cancer and receiving chemotherapy," she says.

Long arm to the office

GoToMyPC is a Web-based remote-access service that lets users access their corporate desktops from any browser-based PC. An always-on client program is installed on the corporate PC, which then stays in constant communication with the GoToMyPC server on Expertcity's network. When a teleworker wants to access his corporate desktop, he connects to the service via a browser and must clear two levels of password authentication before the target desktop appears as a window on-screen.