Backstage with James Gaskin

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The term "remote office" has evolved over the past few years. What does IT consider a "remote office" today?

It seems every employee not sitting at a desk in headquarters is now a remote office. The days of a remote office being a place with a group of people in one building connected back to the main office with a phone company data link are long gone. Now any employee with a laptop or PDA is a remote office. I call this the "socks-based" office. Wherever an employee goes today, his/her remote office support needs go along in a briefcase or pocket.

What is the biggest change you've seen in remote-office networking over the past year?

The number of demands made by the remote worker and the ability of companies to answer most of those demands. IT departments have done a good job delivering a usable work environment to remote workers, which means the remote workers keep asking for more. Complete phone support, including PBX integration, data security and automated backup processes, and security including spam and virus controls, are all on the "can do" list. Not always neat and coordinated and polished, perhaps, but they all can be done.

What are some key techniques for IT managers in helping to manage remote offices, telecommuters and mobile workers?

Planning, when possible, makes life easier. Every new service or application must be scrutinized for the ability to deliver that service to every employee everywhere.

There are thousands of legacy services that must be retrofitted to support remote users, and that's much more trouble. Many of the remote management applications don't yet integrate into enterprise management suites, so remote users are managed separately. That will get better over the next couple of years, but it's tough at times today.

Too often, the remote workers are on their own for security, backup, virus protection, authentication controls and setting up remote connections from public spaces.

When IT managers are considering new applications for the enterprise, should they also look at how the apps could be rolled out to remote offices? Or is that still secondary to how they fit in the corporate network?

Every application and service should be available to every appropriate user regardless of location. The corporate network now extends to every Starbucks with a hot spot, and services should be available for employees sipping their mocha lattes in Starbucks as if they're sitting at their office desk sipping mocha lattes. If a new application can't be used while in a taxi, is it ready for the modern enterprise? Maybe not.