The modern office - stay in touch! (office automation)

• Author: Gerhart, Clifford

The office of the future may be no office at all as LANS, WANS and other high-tech marvels connect employees to the work place.

Business runs on information -- and being competitive depends on gathering, processing and sending vast streams of data. As personal computers have become more powerful and more user-friendly, businesses are finding that the frontier between profitability and bankruptcy can be bridged by linking computers and people together. In addition, computer networks and portable technology are changing the whole idea of an office.

Tom Carroll, product sales manager at MicroAge Advanced Information Services in Anchorage, predicts that the office of the future may be no office at all. "Maybe the model is what we're seeing with a lot of sales reps and people who have to be out of the office," he says. "They can handle a lot of what they do with laptops and cellular phones. More and more, your business doesn't require that you come in the office."

Bill Rosetti, a MicroAge consultant, agrees. "Work is becoming more distributed as access to information improves. Access to information is the reason we were all grouped together in the first place. I could do my job at home now if I wanted to. The technology exists."

LANs and WANs

Computer networks are defined by the size of the area they serve. Local area networks (LANs) connect terminals together, usually within the same building. Wide area networks (WANs) connect computers over greater areas using public switching networks.

Brian Penney, director of technology for Gandalf Technologies, calls local area networks (LANs), the "hallways, stairs and elevators that connect users with the data resources and equipment they need. LAN connectivity provides local connections and a way to focus on grouping resources across distances as well as making them available to individual remote and traveling users.

"Facsimile transmission provides a good example," says Penny. If the information you want to send already exists in on-line, electronic form, it doesn't make much sense to print it out and feed the sheets of paper into a fax machine so it can turn the image back into electronic fax format. Why not send the electronic file to a fax server, which converts the file directly into a fax-compatible form?"

Carroll says that not a lot of small businesses are beyond LAN. "The most significant thing people can do with LANs is share files much more easily than before," he notes. "Rather than hand a...