My personal policy regarding employment is that I never do business with anybody that is within a thousand miles of where I live. I avoid a lot of face-to-face meetings that way, and yes, I have occasionally attended high-level conferences via phone in my bathrobe.

But I do rely heavily on email and VPN connections to communicate with the dozen or so different companies I work for, and this is something that email admins and other network honchos have historically had a problem with. They rightfully want to have control over every aspect of their network, but in this desire, they sometimes mistakenly believe that for them to have control over something, it has to be within the physical boundaries of the enterprise. Those who still believe this will quickly lose control of their networks—because the virtual enterprise is bursting out of its seams and the nature of work itself is changing.

Continue reading The virtual workplace and the email connection