Changing my Workspace

By the end of this year I will have a new office area. All to myself, outside of the home environment. Already I am looking forward to this event. With an interest in both the best way of working and the design of such a place I will be spending some time in looking how to improve my current office environment.

I’ve separated these in two categories. Basics to get the job done, and then Comfort to enjoy the environment. So here is my list so far.

Basics

1. A large rectangular desk

2. A comfy desk chair.

3. Two large flat screen monitors at least 19″

4. Laptop, Internet Connectivity, Printer, Telephone, Web Cam, IPod, camera, shredder

5. Paper, pens, pin-board, files, folders (sometimes its good to go back and be traditional when working)

6. Shelving and Storage

Comfort

1. A comfy chair with cushions for reading, researching, long conf calls etc

2. A small coffee type table to enable me to spread out when working

3. Photos of friends and family

4. A dramatic background picture for when on a web-cam.

5. Plants

This will change no doubt. The best part of moving my working environment outside of the house will be the space and obviously the commute.

Unified Communications Expo

I attended the above conference at London Olympia this week and was impressed at the wide variety of vendors in attendance. There was the opportunity to attend business briefings ranging from UC and Messaging to VoIP for Business. One theme that stuck out to me during the course of this event was the need of our traditional vendors to start working in a more consistent manor than before. What may be an industry standard for telephony may be implemented and configured differently depending on which vendor solution you choose. This theme continued from the Voice Con conference in Orlando when both IBM and MS said they would work together to produce a solution to allow there products for UC to connect. The results of this will be apparent at Voice Con, San Francisco later this year.

The other theme that was apparent was the need to change how we work together to actually realise the investment that is being made in UC. If you work from home or have plans to in the future take a look at http://www.telework.org.uk and http://www.henleymc.ac.uk/henleyres03.nsf/pages/fwf , both sites offer some interesting information about how to better work from home. This is an area that needs further investigation as many customers start to implement there strategies for collaboration and workers start to make that transition from being permanently office based to being home workers.

For me I don’t think I would consider working for a company that did not allow some level of home working.