While the concept of remote workers is not new, advances in technology are enabling the remote workforce in ways that were not possible before. Companies are beginning to explore this new paradigm as a way to reduce their overhead, especially in today’s tough economic climate. Managers are rightly concerned about maintaining productivity of staff not co-located with their colleagues and critical systems. In recent years, though, Intranets and IP telephony have evolved to empower remote staff to easily access office systems, collaborate with coworkers and use their corporate telephone systems.

The most basic requirement is usually telephony and workers have long been able to forward their extensions to ring at home. While functional, it was not ideal since they wouldn’t get corporate phone features and outgoing calls wouldn’t be on the company’s rates. The advent of IP telephony now lets remote workers have a phone at home that is identical in features to their office phone with all the bells and whistles like voicemail, call forwarding, music-on-hold, etc. They can even make and receive work calls on their PC or smartphone using your corporate rates.

Intranet technology has also evolved to allow a remote workforce to access critical information and interact with colleagues. Teams can work together, share documents and set up discussions that not only permit the free exchange of ideas and comments, but also capture the conversations for future reference. All of this can now be done using corporate Intranets, securely accessible over the web. Intranets are now so flexible that we are building and accessing business applications, like Business Intelligence, CRM, Document Management and ERP from within the Intranet’s simple, single-login interface.

Modern technologies are blurring the line between remote and office workers, allowing all workers to have all the same resources and conveniences.

Contact eCorpSys today to learn how you can enable your remote workforce.