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...

Unified Communications is a reality in more than half of companies with annual revenues of $100M to over $1 billion, says the 2012 survey by IDG Enterprise. What is interesting, however, is that the employees or end users don’t know it. By this I mean, in the IT world, UC is a known factor – it has been talked about, tried, and proven true for years now. Ask an end user what UC means to them, and you are likely to receive a silent response with a furrowed brow. 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...

Ever since they switched from quill pens to typewriters, the reluctance of users to embrace a new technology or a new way of doing business has been an issue. It’s also an issue that those of us in the technology business usually have a hard time understanding.

Our jobs involve innovation. Innovative services and products that not only offer these users the chance to do their jobs better, but to do it in style. With cool gadgets! With interactivity and light and sound and sharing and collaboration! What’s not to like? 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...

I was recently thinking about how each and every year, the number of people working in purely “digital jobs” continues to increase.  It made me think of the basic economic premise of Star Trek: When Gene Roddenberry created that series, he envisioned a world where the basic needs of people were satisfied with an unlimited supply of raw materials, allowing folks to focus all of their energy on knowledge and exploration. One embodiment of this unlimited supply idea was Star Trek’s “replicator,” which materialized any food that was in its vast database. While a “replicator” is entirely fictional, over the past 100 years or so, the percentage of people working in agriculture has indeed gone from about 75 percent down to three percent—so the rise of the digital job could be a logical corollary of that trend of more abundant supply.More...

Let’s add one more entry to the list of really good reasons to embrace Unified Communications. It’s a great way to help make your company greener, helping the environment and saving money at the same time. More...

As we near our 40th Earth Day on April 22, it’s a perfect time to look at how technology can help businesses be as green as possible.More...