The Goods: Work at Home

Give yourself the home field advantage by outfitting your office with today's top tech

Posted 03.25.2008 at 12:54 pm 1 Comment

A Laptop That Docks Without Wires The R400 is the first laptop that can connect to any peripheral—printer, monitor, speakers, anything with a USB plug—wirelessly. Just plug them into the docking station. It communicates with the laptop through a new wireless technology called ultra-wideband, which carries video, sound and data faster than Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Signals can travel short distances with nearly the same quality as they would have over cables. $3,700; toshiba.com

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Given the time you save on commute and coffee runs (not to mention suiting up) working from home can often prove more productive than hitting cubicle-land each day. But it doesn't much matter how productive you could be if you're stuck using the beater home PC for crunching reports and your kids' paper scissors for shredding confidential docs.

This Spring, give yourself the home field advantage by upgrading your workspace. From corporate-quality servers to cordless Bluetooth handsets that convert your cell into ordinary phones, this top-notch tech makes working from home a breeze. And, if you still need to make that coffee run, we've rounded up a few products that will let you transform any cafe into a home (office) away from home.

Launch the gallery here.

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posciman

05/13/08 at 5:44 am

I also need to be able to connect to the office, otherwise I get a bit frustrated because most of my stuff are on the office network.

We used to have a VPN box (Aventail/Juniper) at the office to allow some of our users to connect from home.
We have now discovered a new type of VPN that only requires a software installed on both sides. Once connect, you still get access to the remote network (as the old VPN).
It is much easier for us now.

Here are two providers we tried:
- Microsoft Servers (2003, 2008): allows access to the office providing the computer (server) is accessible from the internet.
- WallCooler VPN (http://www.vedivi.com): allows access to the office, no need for the server to be on the internet. Also allows to connect from the office to home.

I guess everyone likes to work from home from time to time nowadays, but small companies (like us) don't want to spend too much for it.

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