New rules on flexible working due to be introduced on 6th April may require additional effort from enterprise IT departments in implementing necessary support systems.

Alongside parents with young children, the right to request flexible working will be extended to workers required to look after sick or disabled adult relatives.
A private member's Bill introduced to the House of Commons last month has also requested that flexible working rules be extended to all parents with children under the age of 18 (current rules affect those only with offspring aged 6 or under).
If passed, this will swell the ranks of Britain’s home workers further, and IT departments will find themselves responsible for rolling out and supporting the hardware, software and network access potentially for much larger numbers of remote workers.

Provisioning email, telephony, IM and collaboration applications to ensure those workers stay in touch from any out of office location can be a challenge.
But new presence aware solutions that show when and where users are, and the best way for them to be contacted, at any one time may simplify the process for both users and IT managers. New collaboration applications, like Groove, that allow documents to be shared more easily without sending and resending via email can also improve the efficiency of remote workers.

The latest version of Microsoft Office, combined with the forthcoming Office Communications Server 2007, will give users sophisticated, easy to use communications tools, said Microsoft product manager for unified communications, Mark Deakin.

“The whole point is that everything should pretty much be there from the familiar MS Office interface – the call forwarding piece that knows where the user is and performs the necessary diversion, and one click buttons that instantly open other forms of communications sessions,” he said.

Provisioning those tools is also easier, he adds, because OCS 2007 will combine the two previously separate areas of IP telephony and Exchange based email, with IM and video conferencing tools bundled in.

"Using Office Communications Server (OCS), administrators can enable IP telephony, IM and Outlook web access alongside email using one button within the same MMC console," said Deakin.

Jeremy Green, principal analyst with research firm Ovum, says it is too early to tell if presence aware unified communications solutions being prepared by a range of vendors can deliver on their promises, however.

“I have seen demos of this sort of stuff and it is intriguing. People can already do email and telephony, but it does not work very well – how rotten a tool is email for collaborative working for example – so there has to be scope for improvement and presence aware applications are things that people find intuitive,” he said.

Green welcomed the extended rules on flexible working, but points out that it is difficult to tell exactly how many people are taking advantage of the provisions
“Attitudes are changing, and the bigger organisations are more sympathetic to flexible working, but the ones who I tend to see most are on the IT side, who have a vested interest in promoting it,” he said.

“Also, many of the people who report themselves as home workers are actually either self employed or people who just work at home occasionally – in other words, not really home workers at all.”