Summertime’s a great time to hit the open road – without leaving life behind. Technology widely available to the consumer market helps the “anywhere” office – and online personality – come alive without an electrical outlet or Ethernet cable in sight. This is Americana in a way Norman Rockwell never could have imagined.

This summer, the Home Office Highway ‘11 road show will showcase the tech, tools and tips that empower people to work and play from the interstate highway – or the information superhighway. The three-week excursion and social media event will highlight how “location independence” can be found wherever life’s journey ventures.

This year, we’ll travel from Fort Lauderdale to San Francisco. Part sightseeing trip, part college tour, all fun-n-games. The van will have laptops, digital cameras and other technology common to the modern family home.

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Jeff @ work at the dinette home office

Cloud computing, Location Independence, the Anywhere Office…

Whatever it’s known by, remote work done beyond the traditional and home office liberates millions of workers every year. Already, countless teleworkers are untethered to work. And more agile remote work strategies and policies ould free even more to explore boundless opportunities – if they knew and used the tools needed to explore this New Way to Work.

Home Office Highway explores those tools and strategies. Over the next month, we’ll write about trip preparation and lessons learned, the tools we’ll use and the applications we’ll log on to from the road.

Travel with us as we reveal how the right technology, client expectations, and family ground rules can help you work wisely from the road. So hit the highway in your RV, a minivan or the family sedan, or set up shop in a beachfront cottage or timeshare.

For many businesses, the ability to work remotely creates a key disaster recovery / business continuity solution.

Remember: “Work is not a place. It’s a thing.” It’s a big country out there. Don’t let a thing like work get in the way of exploring up close and personal.

Online Backup Keeps Home Office & Telework Data Accessible on the Road — and Safe From the Storm

By David Friend, CEO, Carbonite, Inc.

‘Tis the season — for hurricanes and summer travel.

It always amazes me how so many business owners completely neglect the safety of the data on their computers. Or will travel without access to their documents.

Consider this:  during hurricane Katrina, more than 35,000 businesses had their computers ruined. According to U.S. Dept. of Labor Statistics, 40 percent of all businesses that have data disasters never reopen. Some 25 percent of the rest fail within two years.

In short, when you lose all your home office’s or small business records and files, you’re cooked.

And if you’re traveling and don’t have access to your data, files and records, it might as well be locked in a vault somewhere.

It’s likely that more than two-thirds of small businesses do back up their data regularly, but it’s almost always to external hard drives, DVDs or tapes.  Unfortunately, these are usually stored nearby. So if the computer gets flooded, so do the backups.

And they’re inaccessible from any remote location.

That’s why it’s so important to back up online where your data gets stored in a completely different part of the country (hopefully somewhere well away from the hurricane belt). Read More »

Do you like to work when you play? How about work from ‘anywhere’? A study from Citrix Online revealed that for a growing number of American workers, the traditional office is becoming more of a touchpad than a daily destination, or one of several places we do our jobs.

And one of those places increasingly is while away on vacation or any of the popular shorter mini-vacations Americans are taking.

The study, “Web Commuting & the American Workforce,” notes that people are performing at least part of their jobs virtual – and from anywhere, at any hour of the day. How? They’re tapping various technology that allows them to “take their office with them” wherever they go. These remote workers, termed “telecommuters” in the 1980s and 90s, today are called “Web commuters” for their growing reliance on the Internet.

The rise of this ‘Web Commuter’ is changing how people view work. It’s not a place, but a result. It’s not about time, but productivity. As one saying goes, “It’s output, not hours-put.” Among the stats:

– 23% of American workers (and 41% of small business owners) regularly work from home or another offsite location, relying on Web technology (e.g. the Internet, e-mail, or programs that allow them to remotely access their office computers or meet with colleagues online).

– 62% of those who do not have this ability said they would like to be able to do so.

– 14% preferred the ability to work remotely or away from the office at least some of the time as a perk over stock options (13%) and on-site child care (11%).

– 70% of American workers aged 18-34 were most excited about working remotely and would welcome the opportunity.

Products like VPN, or Citrix GoToMyPC, enable people to access their computers from any Internet-enabled destination. That can include a cyber café, or your Verizon wireless broadband aircard. Today, that means work is a thing – regardless of place…