In my previous blog entry, I described the Green benefits of telecommuting and my plan to "road test" telecommuting technologies and experience. For my first test, I have chosen voice communications.

My reasons for choosing this over something more obvious such as remote application access, is that most telecommuting scenarios that I have seen or experienced were based on the telecommuter being able to use a mobile phone for making and receiving calls business calls. This is not always the case, and not in my current temporary scenario where I am overseas from my Silicon Valley office. And if my mobile phone did work here, it would be extremely expensive to use for the number and length of calls I normally make. Generally, I also find this reliance on mobile phone a hassle due to the cost when compared to business or even home landlines, and the knowledge that people who want to call me need to know a. that I am not currently in the office and, b. what my cell phone number is.

Here's something else, I strongly believe that talking is still the most efficient and effective form of communication between two people and sometimes more. I have seen way too much misunderstanding, delays, unnecessary stress or conflict through even best written email, as the written word often lacks the nuances you get in verbal communications. While talking on the phone is still less effective than true face to face talking, it still is a big advancement on email or even IM. I'm sorry, but emoticons just don't match body language ?.

So, as I start this particular evaluation, I have three criteria that I want to test:

1. As many of us work in a highly mobile manner, with the "office" now including when working from home, business travel and other mobile scenarios, how do we maintain a consistent way to be contacted by voice as well as email?

2. We all have a single work email address that is constant wherever we are, but what about our phone number? Why is it that we have to guess whether the best phone number to use is the desk or cell phone?

3. How often do you have to be the manual link between two electronic systems when you have to enter a phone number from an email or customer record into a phone keypad? How often do you type the wrong number because of this? I know I have.

4. How expensive is it to use mobile, home or hotel phones to maintain a consistent amount of voice communication? I believe that the frequency of calls to staff, management, colleagues and customers should not diminish just because you are not in the office.

Now the last 2 of these criteria I can test by using one of Citrix's own products, EasyCall. By installing EasyCall, I can make calls from my PC either by entering the number, or using the click to call feature to dial directly from, say, an email footer. Rather than being a VoIP solution, EasyCall connects a call by first calling my own phone (could be my home line or mobile) before establishing the connection to the number I have dialed. It also has a pretty cool corporate directory function, allowing me to search for colleagues by their name in a similar manner to the deskphone I have in the office.

Now before you think I am just using this blog just to promote EasyCall, there are still the other 2 telecommuting phone criteria that it seems I cannot use EasyCall to evaluate. This means that I still have not re-routed inbound calls so that people calling me, especially from outside Citrix, need not to know that I am in the office or out. In previous telecommuting scenarios I have had to set up, I achieved this by using softphone products such as Avaya IP Agent. In my personal life, I am a heavy user of Skype, so will also be looking at it and other VoIP solutions for inbound calls as well as possibly outbound. The only issue I can foresee with this is that my current connection to the internet has nowhere near the performance I have become used to in California, which may mean the call quality is not to flash. I'll keep you posted on what I try for inbound calls and how it works (or not).

Now back to EasyCall. To use it, I need to install an agent as well as have a EasyCall Gateway installed between the LAN and PBX. Fortunately, the good folks at Citrix IT Services have installed the gateway, allowing me to worry only about the agent. Installing the EasyCall agent is pretty straight forward, the only things I really need to know is where to find the installation files and the host name of my EasyCall Gateway. To see what the installation process was like, check it out at http://www.utipu.com/app/tip/id/2955.

As with all my blogs on Telecommuting, I am eager to hear from you your own views on this topic, or any criteria or scenarios you think I have missed for my evaluations. Just post a comment to this entry.

Most of what is written on Green IT concentrates on how the IT Department can reduce the carbon footprint of its operations, primarily through reducing Data Center power consumption. While this is important as IT operations makes up 2-3% of global power consumption, our efforts to reduce our environmental impact should not end with the data-center. As well as including the end-point into Green IT planning (something I covered in a previous entry), IT can have a role in enabling Green business practices such as the paper-less office, Remote Collaboration (thus reducing the need for business travel) and Telecommuting.

Its this last practice, Telecommuting, which I want to discuss in more detail. For one thing, its something that we can do as individuals (work and management permitting, of course) as well as on a cross-company, cross-industry and even national basis. It fits in with the "think globally, act locally" mantra, with the emphasis on "local".

The Telecommuting trend has for some time been more tied to employee satisfaction, work-life balance and increasingly recruitment strategies (such as "homesourcing"). However, the rapid increase in the price of oil has made the cost of commuting to work a much larger percentage of household budgets, and therefore more noticeable to the average Joe or Jane. While many of us may wish that people would find other motivations to reduce their carbon footprint other than the hip-pocket nerve, rising costs will probably have the most realistic chance of effecting widespread change.

Increasing the number of employees that telecommute rather than drive to the office can cause a significant reduction in the fuel consumption, and therefore carbon emissions, of those individual employees. While this may seem obvious, you can read a detailed study conducted by the University of California....back in 1988! As well, more recent EPA studies have shown that even a 10% reduction of cars during peak hours can reduce the fuel consumption of those vehicles still traveling to the office, as the improved traffic flow results in less time burning fuel in gridlock. To get an idea of how this works, think about how much better your own commute is during school vacation periods.

While this shows there there would be significant benefits to the environment if a greater proportion of the workforce spent at least some time of the working week telecommuting, how practical is this generally, and in specific job roles? If your job does not involve "face time" with customers, telecommuting is probably a more practical option for you than those involved in regular customer interaction. That being said,  there are a number of organizations allowing call-center agents to work from home, such as Cox Communications.

While I have regularly telecommuted over the last decade or so, as well as introduced telecommuting programs for employees doing Tech Support and Customer Care, I have decided to use a period where I need to work remotely to try to measure (at least to qualify if not to quantify) the effectiveness of the technologies used to enable telecommuting. Over the next few weeks, I will blog on my experience based on the following criteria:

• Voice: How can I remain in verbal contact with staff, colleagues and customers? How do they get in contact with me without having to know whether I am in the office or not?
• Applications: How does my app performance vary when not in the office? What impact does occasional offline access make to this?
• Security: What would happen if my laptop or home PC was stolen or otherwise compromised? How do I set up my physical facilities to minimize security risks?
• Collaboration: How important are those "water-cooler" discussions and other face-to-face formal and informal interactions? If they are important, how do you replicate this when remote?

I have experienced challenges with each of these criterion in my own experiences as well as those relayed to me be customers.
While most of the technologies I will be using come from Citrix (partly because we like to eat our own dog food but mainly because we have been a long-time enabler remote work practices such as telecommuting), I will be also looking at other products and technologies to fill any gaps or compare.

I mentioned earlier that I want to use this as an opportunity to discuss telecommuting. As such, I would really appreciate your comments and suggestions on what I should be testing (technologies, criteria and scenarios), what your own experiences have been, and whether you think an increased proportion of your work time as telecommuting would have a benefit to you, your employer, customers/partners and the environment. Please contribute to this discussion by posting comments to this entry. In a later entry I will add a forum address if there is sufficient interest in this topic.

I was fortunate enough to recently meet Christian Knermann from the Fraunhofer Umsicht Institute in Germany. Christian and some of his colleagues conducted a study on the positive environmental impact of replacing PCs with thin clients, using XenApp to deliver their desktops and applications. Having very precise  calculations combined with a detailed explanation of how these calculations were made is significant.

I've been promoting the concept of Green IT within and outside of Citrix for some time now,  motivated by the desire to do something for this world we live in at work as well as in my personal life. While I haven't converted to solar power yet, I have replaced all my commuting and most of my personal traveling from car to bike. I know this isn't something everyone can do (and I can't lug my family of 5 behind me on a bike), I believe we all can do something to reduce the environmental impact of IT operations.

I won't get into the argument of the causes or even the existence of global warming, but it is obvious to anyone that the more electricity we use to power Data Centers and end-points, the more pollution is released into the air. As well, the frequency in which we replace our hardware (and I have been a culprit here) in turn increases the amount of landfill, including some hazardous materials, into the environment.

In my efforts to raise Green IT awareness, I have seen a lot of calculations of the benefits of one technology over another. Sometimes its difficult to verify or even understand the math involved - which has been noticed and noted by others. Particularly when these calculations are on the power consumed or saved, and the costs involved. In many of the cases, I can see the logic behind them and therefore give the results some credence, but I would not have the same level of confidence if I had to relay these figures to an audience, especially one comprised of geeks who tend to, like me, question figures that are stated.

And that is where the Fraunhofer study becomes useful. Their study takes into consideration criteria such as the entire life-cycle of hardware from manufacturing to disposal, the different profiles of user from light to power users and even the effect of powering off at night. Impact was measured not only in power consumption, but also emissions, hazardous waste and even water consumed. The report is very detailed and includes a lot of graphs and tables to support their findings.

I recommend that anyone interested in implementing Green IT take a look at the report which can be found here. While the primary focus of the report is on replacing PCs with Thin Clients, it also covers in summary additional approaches such using 64 bit processors as well as virtualization.

If you speak german, you can also see and hear Christian talk about his work at the Synergy Underground site(http://community.citrix.com/underground/). The badly mangled german questions are from me .

I have been blown away by the great response we got to our first ever Geek Speak Live event at Synergy. From the speakers who were willing to get up in front of a 500+ crowd and be controversial and confronting, to those in the 500+ crowd who asked thoughtful and sometimes confronting questions, and to those who came up to me during breakfast with support and encouragement and ideas. Rather than spend too much time reviewing what was said during the event (which you can view here on Synergy Underground - look for the "Geek Speak" section), I'd like to hear feedback from both those who attended as well as anyone who has seen the videos on what we would like to do next.

Untill we can host another Geek Speak at the next Citrix event,  we could run a regular series of webinars where once again the topic could be anything technical. Speakers could come from Citrix, our CTPs, other IT bloggers/commentators or any of you out there in the community. Another (additional) option is that both the sessions and questions/comments could be via pre-recorded video, allowing anyone in any time-zone to participate. We will also be using our new ADI Forums to keep the discussions going for how ever long people are interested in them (or they stay technically relevant ).

As we work out the next steps, I'd appreciate any comments and suggestions you may have by commenting to this blog or, even better, posting them to the forum at http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=150000&tstart=0.

Well, we getting really close to the start of Synergy, and for me in particular, our first ever Geek Speak Live! Everything is coming together, though there are a bunch of us desperately organizing the last minute details.  

We have a great lineup of "headline" speakers from across the industry, who will be speaking on our center stage from 5:30pm - 6:30pm Tuesday through Thursday. In no particular order they are:

The Barcamp schedule is now completely full of a wide range of interesting topics that are being run mostly by members of the Citrix Community as well as a few Citrites. You can see the full schedule in Barry Flanagan's latest blog post.

Speaking of community generated content, we are also running a competition for the best 5 minute or less videos  made at Synergy. You can learn more about it in Vishal's latest blog.I'd encourage anyone planning to take part to include filming at Geek Speak Live! Most of the real fun stuff will be there, and you may even get me to put on an act or 2 to get the extra publicity .

You can also see some videos and other media being shown using some of the latest App Delivery Infrastructure technologies. Get a sneak preview in Adam's blog.

Anyway, I'm signing off now to get ready for the flight over to Houston. I hope to see you all next week.

There has been a lot of work going on over the last few weeks to pull together the different activities that will make up our first ever Geek Speak Live! un-conference at Synergy. Seeing as it has been weeks since my last post, I thought it was a good time to give you all a sneak preview of what you'll see when you get there....

Center stage, we'll be headlining with quite a "brains trust" of around 12 speakers from across our industry, such as Doug Brown, Rick Dehlinger, Intel's Jun Nakajima and Russ Daniels from HP. Each of these speakers will be given 10 minutes to talk about the topic of their choice and then another 10 minutes to answer questions from the crowd. If the conversation seems to have legs, I'll direct anyone still interested in continuing it to move over to one of three corners to do so; conversely, if I see a few tumbleweeds blowing across the stage, I'll wind up that session and move us onto the next speaker.

In the fourth corner you will find our lounge which, apart from having food and beverages, will also be packed full of gadgets, which you can get a run down from reading Adam Marano's blog on the lounge. Now I don't want to steal any thunder from Adam, but you can also expect to see a setup that any true geek will want to have in their living room. Expect to read more about this soon.

On Wednesday the 21st, we'll be running late into the evening with our series of barcamps. We've had a fantastic response to Barry Flanagan's call for presenters and he will shortly be posting an updated list of sessions.

While we have done a lot of work to make this a cool event, it won't be truly cool unless you join us there in Houston. So if you haven't done so already, register for Synergy which will get you an overload of geeks speaking tech on top of the great technical content you will receive at the iForum and ADI tracks.

You may have heard by now that iForum is now called Synergy, and will be held May 20 - 23 in Houston. I'm working on a new track called "Geek Speak", which will be the most truly techie part of the whole event.

But before I go any more into what we are planning, I just wanted to emphasize that Synergy is replacing the usual iForum event - meaning there will be no iForum in October. So, if you head down to Orlando in October expecting the usual iForum activity, all you might be seeing there is Goofy (and maybe feeling a little goofy yourself).

Our objective for Geek Speak is for it to be an informal event in which you can meet with like minded people to discuss (and even argue) about the technical aspects of App Delivery. We'll have a number of recognized SMEs from outside as well as inside Citrix leading some of the discussions, but there will also be the opportunity for attendees to suggest and even lead additional discussion topics which will voted on before and during the event.

We are going to be a bit more relaxed than previously about the topics that can be discussed at this event. You can expect to see quite a few of our CTPs there talking about the topics dearest to them, as well as a few of our Citrite technical superstars. There will be no powerpoint allowed, with each topic being started by a short discussion followed by open Q&A. If a particular discussion goes over time, everybody still interested in keeping it going will move over to a corner of the room to continue while we allow for the next speaker to start.

I've decided that the theme for this years inaugural Geek Speak  will be "tips, techniques, tools and toys". While the discussions can fall outside of this theme, we will have an area set aside to show off tools and gadgets that the community thinks are cool.

I'll keep you posted with how it all develops, and also keep an eye out for blogs from Gus Pinto & Barry Flanagan who are working with me on this event.  Let me know if you have any ideas for topics or the event in general by posting a comment.

I'm currently working on a new Web site project that aims to shed some light on Application Delivery Infrastructure (ADI) and provides best practices for using ADI technologies to deliver applications and desktops. In short, the site will have sections on:

• Introduction to ADI:  Content explaining the technologies, products, and approaches used to deliver applications to users.
• ADI Best Practices:  Content generated by Citrix and the ADI community about the best way to deliver applications for specific scenarios and use cases.
• Citrix Product Architecture:  Content describing how the products that make up the CitrixDeliveryCenter work from an architectural perspective.

First of all, let me explain that ADI is the category of technologies that most of you reading this blog will already be familiar with. They include Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, WAN Optimization, End User Experience Monitoring, Application Acceleration, and Application Traffic Control. These technologies have one thing in common:  they can be used to deliver applications, both Windows and Web, and desktops to users in a multitude of access scenarios. The Web site I am working on will contain content that explains these different technologies that make up an ADI, as well as descriptions of Citrix product architectures that are part of the ADI.

Over the years, these technologies and their applications (I'm talking about how they are applied, not software apps J) have developed largely in isolation from each other. Vendors of these technologies, and their communities, have been applying them individually as solutions to virtually every type of use case scenario. In most cases, they have been very successful in addressing the scenarios encountered; however, they don't meet all of the requirements for all of the scenarios. Some scenarios in which all of the requirements are not met would be considered "edge cases," but others are pretty common.

Once organizations realize that the technologies can be combined into one infrastructure category, they can then apply the technologies in combinations that can address the requirements of every scenario. The challenge then becomes what technologies to use for what scenarios. I have read some good commentary on this subject (an article from Brian Madden, for example) that has roused some passionate discussions. Another function of this new site will be to provide a place for the community to discuss what technologies can or should be applied in what circumstances. To help this discussion along, the site will contain a number of best practices for using ADI as solutions to deliver applications in specific scenarios---scenarios that include the type of application, location of users, business need (such as business continuity), and other factors. The community will be welcome to add their own best practices based on their experiences.

I'll keep you posted on our progress with this effort. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for additional features and information that you would like to see on this site, please let me know by posting your comments on this blog entry.