The 21st century office 
by Mark Roper, March 2005
Introduction
This article is intended to explain how the Internet can be used to bring your office into the 21st century. Through the use of the Internet, many aspects of traditional office life can be improved and costs for a company can be reduced. This article identifies and explains several of these aspects.
Telephone Systems
Although telephone costs have reduced in recent years, call costs for a company can still be considerable, especially if employees regularly phone other offices in the UK or abroad. Most office have a permanent Internet connection and this can in fact also be used to provide telephony services. The technology is known as voice over IP, commonly abbreviated to voip. Voip phone systems can reduce costs dramatically, since once handsets are bought, call cost can be zero when calling another voip phone. So for example if your company had an office in the UK and another office in the USA, if a voip phone service was used by both offices, the call costs would be nothing. With many voip phone systems it is also possible to call traditional phones and the costs for this can often be very good.
Home-working
With travel to work becoming difficult and commuting time ever increasing, many employees would love the opportunity to work from home. Since the introduction of low cost permanent ADSL lines to home-users, this is now possible. By having a suitably configured server in your office, it is possible to perform simple tasks such as checking email from home, right through to complex tasks such as remotely logging onto your work network and gaining full access. This is best achieved using a concept known as a Virtual Private Network - VPN. With a VPN, all data is encrypted, so you can be sure privacy will be maintained.
Video conferencing
If you have multiple offices or any employees working from home, it may often be necessary to have meetings. Although of course, telephones can be used, the visual concept of seeing other members of the meeting has been proved to increase productivity. A good way to achieve this is through the user of video conferencing technology. With this, each office has a camera (along with a microphone) and they can see and hear each other on either a TV or PC screen.
Intranet
A Intranet is a similar concept to the Internet, except that it is private and the pages on it are only accessible to employees. A Intranet can be used for a large number of office tasks including: planning and assigning work, tracking time, providing company news to employees and making employee contact details (e.g. phone numbers, email addresses) available.
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About the author
Mark Roper is the proprietor of ropernet IT. ropernet IT supply web design & development, site hosting, stock photography and domain registration services. For full information please visit www.ropernetit.co.uk
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