With the advent of portable office technology one need never be away from work, reports Leon Perlman
NOW that global system’s mobile (GSM) cellular telephony has firmly entrenched itself as a pivotal business productivity tool, a new breed of Virtual Office workers using “Portable Office” technology is beginning to emerge.
These “offices” typically consist of a cellphone, a special GSM data/fax adaptor that plugs into a compatible cellphone, a battery-operated portable colour or grey-scale printer, a portable notebook PC, and a CD ROM drive — all snugly housed in specially modified briefcases designed to survive the rough and tumble of constant travel.
Depending on their sophistication, these all-in-one portable offices can cost anywhere from R10 000 to R70 000.
The applications are enormous: time-challenged executives stuck at the airport or in a traffic jam can connect to the venerable Internet, CompuServe, the Microsoft Network, a BBS, or to an office local area network (LAN). They can also send and receive faxes, either live or forwarded from a GSM fax mailbox.
Salesmen can now tap into company databases to check on stock and send orders from a remote site. Sanlam recently placed an order for over 6 000 data/fax-capable cellphones to be used by their representatives, who’ll reportedly be able to do remote on-line compilation of a client’s insurance details, printing out a policy form using attached portable printers. Some companies are even using the technology for building security applications, sending live PC video via the GSM to control centres hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away.
One British-based company has designed an anti-theft and anti-hijacking system that uses hidden miniature video cameras mounted in vehicle dashboards that will constantly transmit live colour pictures of a vehicle thief or hijacker to a control centre via a GSM data signal. This revolutionary system will soon be available in South Africa and might yet become a standard feature of local vehicle anti-theft and anti-hijacking systems. In another application, a Cape local authority plans on linking Hewlett Packard palmtop computers to the GSM data network, sending live consumer electricity meter information direct to their mainframe computer.
Unless you buy one of the many custom-built, all-in-one portable offices, to use these innovative GSM data/fax services with a data/fax ready cellphone you’ll need to buy a cellphone that supports data and fax plus their special digital data/fax adaptors. Unfortunately these adaptors are only available for certain models of cellphones and are very expensive, in most cases retailing at more than R3 000 per unit.