Whilst I can’t be sure, it seems likely that Tomorrows World had a feature back in the 1970s about the imminent arrival of the home working revolution. A scant generation or two later and we might finally be ready.

To seamlessly continue working from chambers, home, courtroom or coffee shop without constraint is a goal slightly beyond a mobile phone and connected laptop. But let’s start with talking and emailing before looking at how you might gain live access to all the systems that help automate your job and smooth collaboration with your clients, colleagues and associates.

All talk

If broadband hadn’t come along the fixed phone line might have quietly disappeared from our homes to be replaced by the ubiquitous mobile phone. With a society heading towards a mobile per person and falling call costs many question the need for connecting a copper wire to their house. But it’s the humble telephone line that now connects any respectable home worker to the Internet and enables the biggest thing in voice communication since the mobile itself: Voice over IP (VoIP).

Whilst a VoIP telephone may look and feel like a normal analogue phone it is actually a computer terminal that transmits voice data digitally using Internet Protocol. These calls can be routed across the Internet to any compatible device like browsing to a web site where location is irrelevant and the only cost might be a service charge to connect back to an analogue phone.

With VoIP your home telephone could integrate completely into your office switchboard with no call costs to the office, none of the hassles of mobile phone communication (dropped calls, fiddly handsets, poor reception, toasted brain), and no confusing contact points for your clients. And as your bandwidth grows, IP telephony lets you carry more data to improve call quality or add video conferencing.

But, of course, this is just the start. Providing VoIP integration for mobile devices is technically possible today and the only barrier is the current cost of data traffic. Obviously, the telephone network operators have a vested interest in retaining their profitability and I don’t expect them to be giving away the family silver any time soon.

By separating the network from the device it allows you to choose your optimal set up. The micro cell phone is just the thing to slip in you pocket unobtrusively, but in your home or office you might choose something a little more comfortable and practical to work with.

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Get the message

Email has become the killer application of the business world and it perhaps tops some people’s list of things to grab from a burning building. For the remote worker this is presently the lifeline for sharing information with clients and colleagues.

Since the general adoption of Microsoft Outlook as one of the World’s favourite applications little has happened to email, but the devices that receive it continue to evolve rapidly.

Once upon a time we lived in a dial-up World, so connecting to messaging was cumbersome and deliberate. Your device would have to (slowly) connect to the Internet and then check with your mail server just to tell you there were no messages. This awkward pull method, where you have to go and ask for your mail, helped text messaging triumph as the unlikely standard for instant messages.

Blackberry is a mobile platform that works around this by simply having the network mail server call you when you have a message waiting for you. Delivering reliable mail in the days of dial-up allowed Blackberry to thrive and is still a popular contender amongst far more sophisticated mobile platforms.

When mobile networks moved to GPRS and then to 3G they made this model redundant as these devices are permanently connected to the data network and can receive data at any time. So the latest pocket sized mobile devices with 3G could deliver almost broadband speeds (384kbps) and run lightweight versions of familiar applications with screen technology and processing power to match your previous generation of desktop.

However, despite the startling cleverness of the latest palmtops; with voice and handwriting recognition that even Fawlty Tower’s Manuel would be ashamed of they remain at best a supplemental device.

Access all areas

Almost any staff member straying beyond the confines of chambers could benefit from better integrated voice and messaging services, but whether you require systems access really does depend on what you want to do remotely and what systems you operate in chambers.

Modern multi-user business applications are generally deployed in some form of client-server architecture. Where there is an installed software application on your computer that does most of its own processing but connects to a central database, we call it a fat client.

So when you open a document from your network in Microsoft Word it is read into memory and processed entirely by the locally installed application requiring no server activity until you want to save it again. On-line gamers playing Half-life 2 only share a small amount of data but require a huge amount of local processing to render their game environment. These applications are fat clients by design.

The alternative to a fat client is, unsurprisingly, a thin client. Here your application tends to be smaller or standardised so that little or no installation of software is required. The processing is mostly performed on your server, transforming it from a data server into an application server. You might not know it but you already use a thin client when you open your web browser.

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Let’s consider some thin client advantages by looking at a single application that you might use: Google. How complex was your installation and how much time do you spend updating it (as the code seems to expand daily)? If Google or e-bay had required the download and installation of an application with constant updates it is unlikely that we’d even know their names. The actual thin client in this case is your web browser and the standard HTML and HTTP formats that allow a wide range of software applications to display content effortlessly.

This zero footprint is of huge benefit to the remote worker as access does not require any installation, so it can be gained instantly from any device that supports these standards. For a software house the effort of deploying software is greatly reduced allowing us to concentrate on developing product and not lengthy and costly upgrades. A few years ago we launched a major on-line application for General Motors to thousands of users in dozens of countries simultaneously. And last Monday morning we released a new application to the staff of Abbey National without even skipping breakfast. When we built InQuisita Law this was one of our fundamental design criteria.

Another popular thin client is the Terminal Server where you install an application that enables you to remotely control a real or virtual computer. The only communication is the rendering of the screen information and tracking your key strokes and mouse movements. All processing is actually done on the server and you are just controlling it through your thin client. In software architecture terms this is a thin client to a client and you are merely deferring processing.

Those needing access to more network resources might create a Virtual Private Network (VPN), where your computer maintains an encrypted and secure channel through the Internet to your office network. Once the VPN is established your remote machine will have access to anything your office computer does, but probably much more slowly. The real downside to VPN is that configuration is required before you connect making it inappropriate to ad-hoc connections.

For most the ideal business application is web based. The combination of technological independence, easy access from any web browser, no configuration, and minimal support requirement make this a clear winner.

So once again we find ourselves at the dawn of the home working revolution where technology need no longer be a barrier. The unresolved question is how effective we can really be when working in relative isolation from our colleagues and without the full resources and resilience that a business spends years to build.

David Randall is managing director of Formation Software, developers of the InQuisita Law chambers management solution
www.formsoft.com