Boost Productivity at Home

Work Better from the Comfort of Your Home

Working from home isn’t a big deal if you use the right gear. We show you the stress-free way to replicate your office in a cozier environment and boost your productivity even when you are not in office. Discover how you can work from the comfort of your home and still stay connected with whatever work you are doing.

Don't Spend on Office Suites

Doing your offce work at home should not mean, you actually spend for it! Offce suites don’t come cheap – if you choose the rather omnipresent MS Office for your home, it could leave quite a hole in your pocket. Thankfully there are free alternatives that work just as fne. This brings us to one of our long time favorites, OpenOffice.org (OOo). This office suite does most things that Microsoft’s Offce can do and most users will not miss any feature using this free software. In OOo, the Writer, Calc and Impress do the job of Word, Excel and PowerPoint respectively. Besides this there are other specialized modules. The look and feel of OpenOffce.org is similar to MS Offce and the transition from one to the other will not take much time or effort. Sun has recently made its Star Offce free as well.If all you want is a light weight word processor, AbiWord is a good choice.

Make Your Data Portable

A flash drive works well with syncing tools to keep your Word and Excel fles updated, but you won’t be able to use the same drive for lager files. There is only limited space. Portable hard drives are an ideal solution here – with 250GB and above storage at much lesser cost per GB than flash drives. With these drives it'll be long before you run out of space – and you can even had an element of fun, using it to copy large media fles. Being highly pocketable, these drives are powered by USB 2.0 ports and are rugged enough for portable usage. With huge storage space you can have an image of an entire partition of your office PC on it and use the bundled software to keep everything up to date on the portable disk.

Go Wire-Free Now!

One of the best things about working from home (and home in general) is the ability to move around at will. That’s of course not possible if you are tied down to your desktop or laptop with all its cables. If you have a laptop, give yourself some flexibility (read luxury!) with a simple and inexpensive wireless network at home. You can then browse and work from your patio, terrace or even your kitchen, if you fancy that! All laptops have built-in Wi-Fi adapters, so you only need to buy an access point (starting at under Rs. 3,000) to connect to your Internet modem. You will then be able to browse without being tied down to wires. You can also access files on your desktop with this configuration. Enable WEP/WPA security to prevent an overly inquisitive neighbor from snooping around.

Work Securely

Wireless networks can be incredibly convenient. At the same time, you don't want unauthorized persons accessing your fles, or running up large phone bills on your broadband connection. Securing your Wi-Fi network is not an option, it's a must! Follow the tips below, and you'll have a safe and hassle free wireless network. Change default password and SSID: Most wireless devices come with simple passwords that are easily guessed. Ensure that this is changed to something that is easy to remember, while being diffcult or impossible to guess. Avoid commonly used words, like the name of your company, spouse, or children. Mixing numbers and letters is a good idea. The SSID is the name of your network. This is generally set to the manufacturer’s name, and that can lead to an attacker trying to exploit a specifc weakness. Set it to something that does not give away too much information. Use WPA in place of WEP: While WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) sounds secure, it is an old standard that has been widely cracked. An attacker can break into a wireless network protected by WEP in a matter of minutes. Most wireless devices support a newer form of wireless security, called WiFi Protected Access (WPA) or WPA2. Check your device manuals for detailed information on how to enable this. If you can't fnd any information in the manual, check the manufacturer's website for a firmware update. Most manufacturers have released updates to allow WPA security. Use Static IP's instead of dynamically assigned ones: While dynamic addressing is easier to set up, it also hands out addresses indiscriminately. If you only have a few devices accessing the wireless network, consider setting static IP addresses. Also, set your wireless access point or router to allow only specific clients to connect. This can be done by enabling MAC address fltering.

Send Fax From Your Home PC

If there is an urgent fax you need to send out – that’s no reason for you to rush to office on a holiday. Do it right from home using Internet fax services. Some of these services are free and ad-supported, meaning, if you are sending this to your client, you’d want to think twice. If it’s to that colleague, they must understand the urgency! There are several sites that offer this service and it is hard to tell which of them is best, but nearly all of them help get the work done. an example of a paid service is fax1.comwhich works on the basis of buying credit. you can buy credit from fax1.com for a minimum of $10 (about Rs 420) and use this credit to avail services like sending a fax. you can also try efax.com which gives you a virtual fax number based in Mumbai (for Indian users). The site also has a 30 day trial offer. Since the quality of these services can vary, we suggest you do a dry run on a monthly basis to ensure it works the way you want it to, before trusting it for a rainy day.

Transform into a Desktop

While the space constraints are justifed in office, when it comes to workinghome on a laptop, the compromise in terms of the cramped keyboard and a “touchy” touchpad can be overcome. You have the option of either getting docking stations for your laptop or simply attach a USB-based keyboard and mouse to the laptop and get the convenience of a responsive full sized keyboard and optical mouse to work quicker. If your work involves a lot of browsing and / or working with documents, you will beneft from a keyboard that has shortcut keys to launch a browser, mail client, for cut-copy-paste functions, even volume and track control when you are listening to music. These keyboards don’t burn a hole in your pocket – they are available for about Rs 500. A mouse is now a lot more than a pointing device. Some of these rodents include special buttons for side scrolling, which is very useful when working with large spreadsheets. And if you can spend a little more, we recommend wireless keyboard and mouse combos, they aren’t as expensive as they used to be and a basic wireless combo can be bought for under Rs 1,000.

Conferencing to Coordinate

An office is at times as much about coordination as it is about actually working. When you are Internet enabled, it is extremely easy to be in touch with your colleagues. This is effective once you have a rapport developed with your colleagues – and once you get used to it, you will be surprised at the amount of collaboration you can do online. Something as simple as an IM conference can be used to discuss matters. For better interactivity and personal feel, add a webcam. Even a modest 128kbps connection will be able to cater to a webcam video on IM. If you are to explain features of a software by demonstrating it, you can use a screen grabbing tool like Camtasia to select a Window or a part of it and stream it as webcam video on Yahoo! or MSN. The users at the other end don’t need any special software to view your feeds.

Office mail at Home

Apart from using a mail client like Outlook, most organizations implement a web-based interface as well – you can type in the name of the mail server in your browser and use your user id and password to get access to new mail. However, mail already forwarded to your Outlook will not be available in most cases, neither will your Outlook (or OE) Address Book be accessible. Another method is to setup your mail client at home with the POP3 and SMTP address of your mail server. Remember to explicitly tell your software at home to ‘leave new mail on server’ or ‘don’t delete mail from server’. Otherwise, those mail that appear at home won’t be available in offce! Many flash drives provide mail syncing feature which can keep two or more computers in sync with email. This of course requires you to carry your pen drive with you whenever you want to sync mail.

Connect Remotely to Office PC

Having your Files and email synchronized helps a great deal, no doubt. But what if you need to use an application on your offce Pc? or, let's say, you forgot to sync something before you left for home? This is where the remote desktop feature comes in handy. This let's you access a PC from some other location – the desktop of the PC you are accessing will be displayed to you and you can work on it as well. So it is quite literally a ‘remote’ desktop. Do note that some organizations block this feature due to security concerns, so check with your IT department before trying this out. Remote Desktop is available in Windows XP natively.