We were taken by surprise by the news that Yahoo is apparently turning thumbs down on telecommuting and remote work, and will begin to require everyone to come to the office. If this turns out to be true, there are a lot of Yahoo people who are going to have to make some adjustments.

You can read this Fierce article about the move, along with some read-between-the-lines interpretation about the possible motivations behind it. But even taken at face value – that the reasons for this change in approach is to foster more face-to-face collaboration and creativity – it all seems so retro. More...

There may not be any such thing as a free lunch, but there just may be such a thing as free bandwidth.

Sound too good to be true? We can’t blame you for being suspicious, but Marty Parker over at NoJitter makes his case for leveraging Unified Communications to modify your mix of traffic in order to accommodate video with no need to add capacity. More...

We talk a lot here about collaboration, of course, and how Unified Communications technologies make that possible. We’re all pretty much in agreement that collaboration is a good thing.

But it is possible to emphasize collaboration too much, and that’s the point of an interesting column at NoJitter by Melanie Turek of Frost & Sullivan. Think of it this way: let’s say you love strawberry ice cream, as some of us do. But instead of simply enjoying that delightful post-dinner bowl of sweet, creamy heaven each evening, you decide to have strawberry ice cream at every meal. That wouldn’t work for more reasons than we can begin to list. More...

OK, we’ve all had those dreams right? I still remember my nightmares as a six-year-old about getting on the school bus only to realize that I was still wearing my pajamas. This week, a host of companies in Silicon Valley hosted a series of events that I have dubbed “National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Week.”More...

Five years ago, Time Magazine named “You” as its Person of the Year. Shortly thereafter, I started writing an internal blog at Sprint called “CG’s Soapbox.” The blog’s title paid homage to the days when a person would literally grab a wooden box, plop it down on a local street corner and start speaking freely.More...

We’ve all heard it said many times that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. For that reason, even if no other, it pays to know where technology came from and the problems it was designed originally to solve.

But when Network World ran a recent series of posts on the history of Unified Communications and collaboration, we have to admit we were more interested in the series-ending conclusions and perspective on where we are now and where we are going than we were in the evolution. Especially since the author was Larry Hettick, the Current Analysis analyst. More...

The first post I wrote when Seamless Enterprise  began was entitled “I’m Done with Web 2.0.” That wasn’t literal; what I was saying is that I felt like I had finally found the missing pieces to understand the impact of social media as a whole, despite the fact that I had scratched my head trying to understand the value of many of the individual pieces. But now I really am done with Web 2.0, meaning my focus now is on the elusive future-state that I assume someone else has already coined “Web 3.0.” More...

According to a new report, some 50 million workers in the U.S. have jobs that allow for at least part-time telework, but only 2.9 million are actually doing it.

But considering the lack of clarity in definitions of telework, determining the accuracy of that number, and other telework data, is tricky, as Gary Audin writes over at NoJitter. The report he references is the result of some numbers-crunching from a mix of mostly-governmental data sources. Our guess is that it gives a more-or-less accurate overall view, but we wouldn’t stake a business decision on any specific data point. More...

The video component is increasingly important in any Unified Communications implementation that takes into account the evolving way we communicate. And while videoconferencing may get the job done, telepresence is where video needs to be for the most effective, almost-like-being-in-the-room, meetings. More...

Video and videoconferencing are a central part of the Unified Communications package, but enterprises may not be using them to their full advantage. More...