September 30, 2004

Virtual Offices come in many shapes and sizes

Yesterday Groove hosted an online seminar about how to create a virtual office, of course touting its very good collaboration space.

Nortel Networks also offers businesses a robust solution for letting their remote workers have a "virtual" office wherever they are.

News Factor writes Nortel's latest product rollout gives the user a series of icons to click in order to contact a colleague or to access applications, whether parked in front of a desktop at work or accessing the network from alaptop Latest News about laptop on the road. The article continues While the product line is leading-edge, Kraus emphasizes that companies must carefully think through the reasons why they want to deploy them. "Don't deploy it if you are just trying to replace the same functionality that you had with your PBX," he warns.

Instead, "companies should look at IP telephony as an avenue to do something entirely different, instead of re-enabling what they did before," Kraus suggests. For example, the new functionality could lead to changing business processes, which could result in increased sales.

"Thinking like that is the road to maximizing the value of IP telephony," says Kraus. "Nortel is doing a smart job focusing on what is different as opposed to just what you had before, only on a different platform."

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