Depressing

Sigh: what I find really depressing about remote working isn't the technology choices or lack thereof, but that PHBs still form the biggest obstacle. "If we can't shoulder-surf, we don't believe you're doing any work", regardless of whatever one may or may not produce.

As for the technology itself, back in the day I had a kilostream and a pair of DEC bridges, the remote one needing resetting by an IT bod on average twice a day, leading me to regret not choosing the much bigger and uglier router instead. Access to the intarwebs (such as it was) was provided gratis by the company through their network, which was a workable solution in terms of their own data integrity and kept everyone happy provided I didn't do anything that would also get me booted off an ISP.

But that was 18 years ago, and thanks to the observation in the first paragraph, I've had little chance to see how things have progressed in that time.

Maybe someone should sell the resulting lack of commuting as a "green" issue... nah, it'd make a difference so it would never work.

Worth a read..

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/05/on-working-remotely.html

Paris: Cos she would never work remotely, always face to err... *gets coat*

Whitepapers / Guides

This article does not really say anything that would help people make a decision on particular products or services. Basically it says you need to look at this, this and this.

Having started a business over the last year with three people in three different locations I have come up against a lot of the issues mentioned.

It could be worth making a few Reg guides of How To - from actual vendor options to setup and implementation. Things that need to be considered are

File access - With either replication, cloud service offline and online

Documents on multiple mahcines - MS Office, Google Docs

Mail Setup - Hosted exchange/ google apps

Comms - VOIP, physical phones, mobiles

All these things need to be integrated and fully functional when trying to let people work from anywhere.

Just a thought

VPNs

I have to say the quality of the VPN applications has improved over the years, we use the Vodafone VRAC remote access client, but it takes me nearly 17 minutes to login from power up (power up laptop, login in to laptop, start windows, login into windows, start VRAC app, login to VRAC). Cumbersome but at least with broadband it’s reasonably quick. In a previous job I once logged in on a dialup line and it took MickySoft outlook 5.5 hours to resync my email!!!!!!

Now if only MickySoft didn't keep fucking up my roaming profile when login on different machines.

Small businesses just need some pragmatism

We use Draytek Vigor routers for VPN - they also do VOIP options if you want it (we use Skype instead) and can have two broadband links. To control our server remotely for a single connection (it gets you on as the console) I prefer RADMIN - the server end is peanuts, the clients are free and the bandwidth is very low - I've even used it on a 40k dial up. You can tune the colour bit-level to help the bandwidth. It gives the added advantage if two of you connect to the RADMIN server you can both see and work on the same session.