| This book is being written in a small village in Sachsen-Anhalt in Germany, among other places. I live in this village. There is no access to DSL here; there are no public WLAN hotspots, no UMTS, no large companies and no city noise.
My work consists of activities like lecturing, advising, listening, testing and trying, programming, learning how to understand structures, trying to get to the bottom of things, and constantly testing again. This means customers in different countries, with different languages and cultures. A lot of these activities can be done online. But I am often on the road for weeks on end. Long car, bus or train trips; short to extremely short response times for email customer inquiries. This type of work has ramifications on what we used to call an office.
Five years ago, it was normal to store e-mails on your home or office computer. Today, various service providers are offering almost inexhaustible disk space for these purposes. In larger companies, terminal servers are becoming more and more influential. The bandwidth of Internet connections is increasing; maybe in my village soon as well!
The terminal with which you and I access our information becomes ever less important. What you really need is a stable, affordable Internet connection over WLAN, UMTS, telephone, or satellite, a browser, a screen that can display the information, and a keyboard that is as ergonomic as possible and, of course, electricity. You can access your pool of e-mails, pictures, and documents from anywhere in the world.
In this world, a company, an institution, an association, an organization needs an Internet presence that is also user-friendly and flexible. One that is in tune with the times, one that can be easily modified from a browser, and that replaces your briefcase and your address directory, that can communicate with all kinds of systems, and that is easily expanded. |