A few choice quotes from Home/work's A-plus, an article by Christine L. Romero, The Arizona Republic, Jul. 4, 2003.

"Telecommuting trend thrives as businesses lower costs and employees find a balance."

"The savings for employers can be significant. Management Recruiters International estimates that employers can save $10,000 per employee by reduced absenteeism and job retention costs. Experts say real estate costs can sink by as much as 25 percent."

"CIGNA has seen a 75 percent return-on-investment in the past five years for its nationwide teleworking program used by about 2,500 workers nationwide, said Lynne Kelley-Lewicki, the head of CIGNA's "e-work" program."

2:37:14 PM    
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Robin Good takes a look at  Ridgeway's IPFreedom, a software utility that "enables end-to end IP Voice and Video by securely crossing network firewalls and NATs." WaveThree's Session videoconferencing tool (see earlier post) is one of many which rely on IPFreedom for firewall and NAT transversal, as explained in the Session Deployment Overview (PDF). Other companies include Polycom and Indigo Software.

2:11:54 PM    
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Robin Good looked at a few tools for videoconferencing in PC-to-Mac Audio and Video Conferencing Comes Of Age, including a more detailed look at one of them:

"Session from WaveThree is an impressive application, the first one that I can see effectively bridging the long-standing barrier between Mac and PC users. While there are still some rough edges to be smoothed out Session provides effective audio and videoconferencing with excellent quality, application/desktop sharing, one-click remote control and an effective presentation multi-slide whiteboard that can accommodate images, photos and live annotation form all live participants. "

Here in the Telework Lab, Donna Garfield had installed and tested Session just last week. She was also impressed with its quality, using only a low-priced camera (Logitech's QuickCam Pro 3000) and her Win2K laptop's internal microphone and speakers. Her tests ran through all of the features and options available without experiencing any of the crashes or error messages Robin Good mentioned. Here's a quick run through of the steps she took to set up and test the software:

11:28:41 AM    
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