By 2009, 14 million workers will not be driving into the office
Victor Cousins has a pretty good gig working for the human resources department at Sun Microsystems, but he doesn’t have an office, just a locker.
Alright, so maybe “fun” is a stretch, but Plantronics’ Calisto Pro sure makes working from the confines of home a lot more plausible.
Google recently began including Sun’s StarOffice suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other workplace-oriented programs for free as part of the Google Pack download.
StarOffice is Sun’s commercial version of the freely distributed OpenOffice suite, which also was developed by Sun and has been downloaded about 100 million times.
StarOffice includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation tool, a personal database, and more, and though it doesn’t provide support for Microsoft’s new XML-based Office 2007 formats, it does handle Redmond’s older MS file types. Plus, it can save files as PDFs.
Telecommuting is becoming more common, thanks to the proliferation of wireless technologies and feature-rich Internet applications.
More than half (58 per cent) of chief information officers (CIOs) surveyed for a study by Robert Half Technology say their companies’ information technology (IT) workforce is telecommuting at a rate that is the same or higher than five years ago.
Business Edge News Magazine – businessedge.ca