As the Convergence Specialist at NEC it's my job to straddle the fence between the phone world and the computer world. I deal with the "You got voice in my data!" concepts here. I started here 9 years ago, when VOIP was barely in its infancy and I was only interested in servers and switches. I never would have dreamed I would be troubleshooting voicemail servers and voice issues.

We recently hired a new account executive and it was my task to set him up as a SOHO user at his home in New Hampshire. We're using several very cool technologies to do this and help this remote worker feel like they are in the office and not so remote.

I outfitted him with a VPN phone which is an Avaya 4610 IP Phone loaded with firmware that allows it to be a standard IPSEC VPN client. The phone boots up then creates a tunnel over the internet back to our office. Voila! An office phone at his house, with PBX dialtone and 4 digit dialing to the rest of the company. Any and all PBX features are available to him

The phone guys set him up with EC500. This is a software feature of Avaya Communication Manager that bridges an internal extension to a cellphone. Now, customers call his office number and both the cellphone and the office phone ring at the same time. He can now be reached almost anywhere with a single phone number. As opposed to forwarding calls, the caller ID of the original caller shows up on the cellphone.

We're using the Juniper SSL VPN capability extensively here at NEC, and it allows our remote users to access all the company LAN resources and terminal server from anywhere. The Juniper client installs with very low overhead and doesn't even require a reboot. Softphone on a laptop is even usable over the SSL VPN for those time when you're on the road in a hotel.

All these things make a remote worker not very remote at all.

-- Jay Tarbox