Office 2007 Pro Virtual office
 

only some organization processes are impacted by workers
becoming distributed geographically. quite a few never transform whatsoever. lots of benefit
from automation, whether employees are centralized or distributed.

collaboration.
working together to achieve some result. goals of the dod darpa intelligent
collaboration and visualization (ic&v)
research program include developing infrastructure for rapid assembly of
high performance teams and teams of teams to solve problems that arise
quickly in large-scale military command and control settings and even more
often in "operations other than war," e.g., disaster relief.
often, collaboration is across organization boundaries, involves intelligence
gathering, secure communications, sharing diversely encoded information
models on a need-to-know basis, continuous planning and scheduling, and
coordinated action to fulfill a hierarchy of mission objectives while satisfying
a variety of constraints or small business rules.

composition of
an organization. a virtual organization or virtual team
has a mission, resources, and members. onto this basic structure is imposed
a collection of organization relationships, online business processes,
and boundaries that together are composed to form a description
of the detailed instance of a working organization at some point in time.
in any organization, evolution occurs and the organization over time can
be reconfigured. static organizations undergo alter infrequently; the
alternative is to provide for dynamic reconfiguration. operations that
switch an organization are called "moves". some moves are welcome
and expected, e.g., giving out raises; others may not be, e.g., drug testing.
moves must maintain company invariant constraints, often called
business rules, e.g., don't overspend your department budget. virtual teams
are in some ways simpler than virtual offices in that they are an abstraction
that may ignore some of the possible rich set of choices in an organization,
e.g., preserving intellectual property boundaries, which they may do because
they are wholly within some context where that is a non-issue. that
is, they project out (ignore) some of the possible abstractions
that an organization might be composed of and invariants that it might
try to maintain.

corporate memory.
the cumulative experience and intellectual property of an organization.
corporate memory loss is the decay of that knowledge over time as
personnel fail to record or maintain known information, the information
grows stale and loses currency, or personnel leave taking expertise with
them. not all such memory loss is bad; the term semantic garbage collection
refers to purposely removing old records and corporations usually have
policies for record retention for some kinds of records. a related command
and control notion is situation assessment, where a model of a problem
is created and maintained, often shared by a lot of people with different kinds
of expertise, and used for recording the current state of a situation,
alternative courses of action, changes, and continuous planning.

encapsulation.
encapsulation is the logical hiding of these details that only affect the
functioning of the organization and not its results, products, or services.
the customer may not need to know or care if a supplier is organized as
a virtual office as long as high quality products and services result for
competitive cost.

gratuitous
communication. hallway conversations and socialization, coffee and
lunch breaks, all these interactions lead to a feeling of community and
may lead to the exchange of good ideas. this form of communication is often
missing from the virtual office, except via email levity.

home office. an
office located in a worker's home. may qualify for an irs tax exemption.

home workers.
a broad swath of people from mothers who work part time to professionals
locating full-time offices in their home.

infrastructure.
technology needed to support the information processing and communications
needs of an organization. until recently, many organizations purchased
low level infrastructure (hardware) but created custom software systems
in-house. in recent years, more modular software with standard interfaces
is providing higher levels of interoperability, making it increasingly
possible to interoperate with customers and suppliers in environments other
than an employer's proprietary legacy environment.

intranet. refers
to a company's private internet or more loosely to the computing infrastructure
within an organization. for several centralized organizations,Microsoft Office 2010 Home And Business, this usually
consists of high speed communication lines, local area nets, workstations,
pcs, or dumb terminals, all supporting tcp/ip and encapsulated in a physical
security firewall, which allows only some communication protocols like
email and also allowing modem-based dial-in password-based connections
from employee's homes. intranets based on internet technology are much
cheaper to maintain than proprietary corporate networks. firewall-based
solutions make it very difficult to permit finer-gained or logical information
access in a controlled way, which would permit some customers to "see
inside" the organization but with limited access, for instance. virtual
private networks and certificate-based security use encryption on top
of standard internet and can be used to accomplish this. the
intranet: a corporate revolution is a comprehensive list of the advantages
of intranets and links to other intranet sources.

location-independence.
in this context, location-independence is the property permitting a
worker to move about freely from place to place while carrying or having
immediate access to his/her personal environment, including work environment.

middleware. monolithic
"stovepipe" systems that don't interoperate or share information
well are increasingly being replaced by more modular, standards-based technology.
middleware refers to a layer of communication-bus software that provides
standard communication data models, interchange formats, services, and
facilities that together constitute a standard framework for rapid assembly
of distributed applications (see object management
group). today, much middleware is domain generic but increasingly standard
middleware exists for interchanging domain-specific technical and small business
data electronically (e.g., electronic data interchange, pdes/step, omg
corporation object facilities, standard interfaces to reduce accounts receivable
cycle to improve cash flow in supply chains).

mobile employees.
staff who travel and work at the same time. includes field workers (e.g.,
insurance assessors), internet business travelers with laptops, and anyone who moves
to where the work is (e.g., home repairmen, soldiers in the field). this
may imply a need to carry tools and information to the work site and possibly
communicate sometimes in an untethered mode but often in a permanent remote
site (e.g., via isdn), either continuously (e.g., using wireless connections
for email, for instance, from radiomail or datalink international) or discretely
(e.g., via dial-in lines or periodic sneakernet), possibly away from conventional
infrastructure (e.g., in a jungle) or connected to normal or abnormal infrastructure
(e.g., via foreign plug adapters and telephones) or connected only by long-distance
to an internet provider (e.g., using satellite links like hughes direcpc
turbo internet service (see www.direcpc.com - using a direcpc satellite
dish, one gets 400 kbps on download) unless you are an information provider
when uplink bandwidth is too low), and often in band-width constrained
circumstances where quality of service varies widely (<1kbs, 2.8kbps,
28.8kbps, 128kbps, higher). infrastructure required includes wireless modems
(spread spectrum (2 mbps) or infrared modems (3 mbps)), routers to modem
banks, phone jacks, adapter plugs, telephone, isdn, or high speed lines,
phone, fax, videoconferencing, white boarding, and palmtops or laptops.

mobile office.
tools, technologies, and workspace that a mobile worker needs to get his/her
job done.

mud. in
on-line game-playing, multi-user dungeons provide complex reconfigurable
environments, roles, and habitats.

nomadicity. as
defined by the cross industry working group (xiat), nomadicity
is the "the ability of people to move easily from place to place,
retaining access to a rich set of services while they're moving, at intermediate
stops, and at their destination. a person is a nomad vis-á-vis the
nii if she moves as little as from one desk to an adjoining one or as far
away as across the continent."

personal
environment. as
defined by the cross industry working group (xiat): "the numerous
parts of our lives -- our family life, internet business life, personal social life,
small business social life, etc. - each frequently involves a different physical
location. people move between these places as they move between the different
aspects of their lives. doing the appropriate thing in the appropriate
place is key to the way various people organize their lives."

remote employment, remote
work, telework. any working arrangement where
the employee performs some significant portion of his/her work from some
work site other than the employer's central office-typically from the employee's
home, thereby substituting information technologies for commute time. remote
staff include a wide variety of knowledge staff, e.g., accountants,
architects, attorneys, bookkeepers, claims adjusters, computer programmers,
engineers, estimators, graphics artists, journalists, technical researchers,Office 2007 Pro,
technical writers, telemarketers, transcriptionists, and numerous more. depending
on the conditions of work, the internet business relationship between the company
and worker may be employer-employee or employer-contractor. contractors
generally provide their own equipment, communication lines, have different
performance evaluations, and set their own hours.

society
of experts model. a step beyond a virtual office where individuals
provide expertise to several organizations and the line is blurred between
employee and contractor. certainly, this model requires distributed work.
agreements on compensation, statement of work, ownership of intellectual
property all must be made explicit in this model.

tele-. at a distance.
examples: television, telecommunications, and more recently telemedicine,
telelibraries, …

telecommuting.
communicating, collaborating, and working while geographically separated
from the central office via electronic devices such as faxes, videoconferencing,
or modems. the term was coined over twenty years ago. telecommuting is
more relevant to periodic remote employment, where the employee
spends time in an central office and occasionally "telecommutes"
there, than virtual office. see gil
gordon associates, a center for telecommuting information.

telepresence.
just like staying there. several technologies enable varying degrees of telepresence,
from mail to phones, video conferencing, and virtual reality. smellivision
is still a research area as are star trek holodecks.

telework centers.
when workers work remotely from a central site but not at their home,
instead at a satellite center. the center may be owned by one employer
or space rented to permanent,Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit Full Version, migrant,Office Visio Professional 2007 clave, or occasional employees (called hoteling).
executive office suites are a variant where businesses share secretaries,
meeting rooms, etc. incubators are variants of these where new internet business
are provided additional services including corporation advice when getting
off the ground. airlines provide a variant for nomadic workers via a membership
fee at airports (e.g., admiral's club).

videoconferencing.
when individuals or groups meet together at the same time but at different
sites and can see and hear each other. two way, broadcast (as
in m-bone), and multi-way conferences are supported but for differeing
technologies or costs. videoconferening is related to audioconferencing
which only involves groups of people hearing each other and which is far
more pervasive today. see section of internet tool survey on video-conferencing.

virtual. a logical
abstract surrogate or simulated function. opposite of real or physical.
examples include virtual memory, virtual reality, virtual
environment for training, virtual
classroom, virtual
laboratory, virtual space, virtual clipping service, virtual meeting
room, virtual
pet office building, virtual
tour of ireland. in the case of a virtual organization, it almost always
involves physical distance between personnel or operating teams, but sometimes
it involves security boundaries (e.g., firewalls) or legal boundaries (e.g.,
ownership of intellectual property co-produced by member organizations
in a virtual enterprise). some virtual organizations are aggregate composites
of a number of real organizations.

virtual office, virtual
company, virtual corporation.
(1) a permanent corporation or partnership containing a significant number
of remote employees. the virtual office fulfills all of the roles of the
traditional, centralized office (e.g., it has corporate officers, owns
intellectual property, has workers, pays taxes) although the personnel
work at home offices and collaborate for the most part electronically with
occasional to no physical contact with other personnel. see advocates for
remote employment and the virtual office (arevo).virtual
offices are typically corporations (legal, logical entities) and corporations
typically are not defined with respect to geographic locality of personnel.
virtual offices are a matter of degree since even in conventional offices,
various online business relationships are necessarily maintained across distributed
environments, for instance, customers and suppliers are located at different
sites, project co-workers are often located in different divisions, and
the ceo's speech may be via videotape. in both traditional and virtual
office's the organization mission remains the same, but some home business
procedures improve in the latter to accommodate collaboration at
a distance. (2) a dynamic, interactive vrml model of an office where
drawers of filing cabinets pull out, the calendar or clock can be viewed,
and the phone rings. an
example.

virtual enterprise.
an assembly of best-of-class geographically distributed individuals and/or
organizations assembled an "enterprise" for the purpose of solving
a specific problem or creating a product. the virtual enterprise may disassemble
after completing its mission (but often does not). see niiip
definition of virtual enterprise. anti-trust rules apply to limit unfair
competition and some virtual enterprises limit technology they produce
to pre-competitive technology or reference implementations leading to standards,
available to all member organizations. generally,Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 32Bit Full Version, technology needed by
a virtual enterprise is similar to that needed by a large central enterprise
except in some respects: