Evidence suggests that working from home is becoming increasingly attractive to employees and employers alike, and a growing number of organisations are encouraging their staff to consider this option.

The possibilities were recently brought home to me when my teenage son suggested he could help me out at work a couple of days a week to raise some summer spending money. The one condition being he gets to work from home!

On the face of it, his offer seems very reasonable - we can easily communicate by phone and e-mail. While this might be fine for dealing with routine matters, what happens when meetings and conferencing are required? How can the technology cope with the need for face-to-face contact and the ability to share documents and applications effectively?

Video conferencing with the ability to share applications could be the answer. However, are companies willing to invest in the technology? A look at the marketplace where the technology is now available, at a premium, would indicate that the answer is most definitely yes.

Until now, the weakness of video conferencing systems has been the inability to deliver high-quality audio and video in an Internet environment along with cross-platform capabilities and high levels of security. The solution is software which enables a video conference to join a meeting room with people using their laptops and PCs.

Researchers and PhD students from 57 locations in Europe, Israel and Australia are already using desktop video conferencing for groundbreaking research into artificial intelligence.

Specialists in optimisation, statistics and computational learning are using desktop conferencing to meet and work across the Internet. Experts in computer vision, speech recognition and information retrieval are also striving to develop software to perform automatically a range of sophisticated tasks.

Once companies realise that video conferencing is workable and also has the facility to share and amend files in real time, many more of us might be working from home. And the good news is we'll still be able to see our workmates daily and even share a joke or two in a designated E-video meeting room!

Michael McMeekin is managing director of Wisdom IT. Log on to www.wisdomit.co.uk

Published: 02/08/2005