Apple Remote Desktop (ARD Admin 3.0) will take care of you accessing a remote Mac. RDC will take care of you accessing a remote PC through VPN. Also there’s this product called Mac Office 2004 that should handle your Office needs. (Well, except Access). AS400 connectability shouldn’t be a problem through RDC. JOIN US!!! 
You mean I’d access my own PC? Hm. The files I need are on the network drives. But the Easytrieve program is on my PC. If I can access my own PC from here and run Easytrieve, then that would work. Only the truth is I don’t want a lot of ‘work stuff’ on my Mac. At least not until I get a new one. I do have Office for Macs; and no, it doesn’t have Access.
Question: Can you use VPN over a wireless?
With PC laptops becoming so cheap, why not just get one?
My garage isn’t big enough to hold a 737, so the answer is no.
Johnny, I use the VPN client built into Mac OS X to connect to our office LAN, then use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Client (a free download from MS) to remotely control my office PC. It does work over a wireless connection, and has different optimized settings for different access speeds. System response is pretty good, so long as you’re not trying to do stuff like video or music. MS Office, email, and some basic browsing take care of 95% of my computer needs at work, so I’m fine for that. The only piece of software I have installed on my Mac at home to do this is MS RDC.
Plus, I have a SIP phone running across it’s own VPN into our phone system. It has it’s own extension, but I can hotdesk my office extension to the SIP phone, so it looks to the PBX like it’s my office phone. Even pages and the voice mail light work.
This is all nice, but since I manage people, most of them managers, I need to be around the place to do my real job. The telecommuting works nicely to get a headstart on the day, or catch up in the evenings or weekends. Even so, my physical commute is about four minutes, so it’s no big deal.
:smack: I forgot I had that! The VPN we use at the office to log into my Former Employer’s computer has a token that synchs the password and changes it every 30 seconds. When I worked for FE I tried to use my office laptop from my apartment using the VPN, but was never able to connect. (I could use the VPN to connect when I was in FE’s building, but that wasn’t useful.) I used a cable to connect at the apartment; not the AirPort. For some reason I could never get the AirPort to work with the cable modem. Time-Warner said I needed a router. Up here AirPort works fine with the Comcast modem. (The only glitch is that my new HP printer is not compatible with AirPort.)
FE said that we were not to use their VPN wirelessly. I don’t know if it would work and we were not supposed to connect wirelessly, or if it wouldn’t work. If the latter, I could always just connect with a cable. But I’ve just thought of another issue. FE only gave us one token, and there are two of us (I and my boss) who need to log in. So I wouldn’t be able to take the token home. (OTOH, the only reason I have to log in to FE’s computer is to check on our data to see that it’s been loaded. I could do that once a week at the office.)
Since there are other people who only come in once a week, I’m sure our SA can hook me up for everything other than the FE connection.
My boss thinks I work too long. The other day I left five minutes before my ‘official’ time, and she said I’d ‘worked past my time’ just because I’d come in 20 minutes early (I usually come in 10-20 minutes early, depending on which bus I catch) and didn’t take my two 20-minute breaks (which I never do). Whenever I do anything work-related at home on a Friday (I check my email from home) she says ‘What are you doing working? It’s your day off!’ This ‘work’ is just answering emails but sometimes there’s a file I could work on if only I had Easytrieve access. It sure would be nice when I’m thinking about programming something if I could do it when I’m thinking of it!
Question about bandwidth: If I log onto my office PC, I’m using the company’s bandwidth. (Also I’d have to leave the PC on, and we’ve been instructed to turn them off every night because they need to be off for system updates.) Does it take more bandwidth to log onto my office PC, or to have a PC at home and log into the system? (FWIW this is how I work: When I get a file I save it to my network drive. When I’m finished with it I save it to a different network drive. When I write programs I save the them to my network drive and save the results to the same folder I use for the manually adjusted data. From home I could save to a local drive and just log in to save the data/program files to the network folders.)
It would about have to use more bandwidth to log in remotely. If the bandwidth from your office PC to the network drive is A, and the bandwidth from your Mac at home to your office PC is B, then the bandwidth used when you’re logged in remotely and accessing the network drive via your desktop PC is A+B.
I suppose you could, with the help of your LAN admin, connect to your LAN via VPN, then, rather than connecting to your desktop with RDC, map your network drives on your Mac at home. This way you would be doing all the file processing on your Mac at home, and simply saving your work to the network drive. In my mind, this is a step backwords in terms of security. If you’re logged on remotely to your desktop, and doing all file manipulation on that machine, the company’s files don’t leave the LAN. Unless you explicitly copy the files home to your Mac, once you log out, the files you’ve worked on remain in the office, and not on your Mac. If I have my way, in five years this is how all of our employees will be accessing company files remotely. We’ve had too many close calls with misplaced laptops.
One other thing: some wireless routers have VPN traffic blocked by default. Our IT staff had to enable VPN traffic for our conference room wireless router.
I’m the Operations Supervisor at a data center. The 50% technical stuff I do could be done telecommuting, but the “Supervisor” part, that kinda requires being in the same geographical location as those I’m supervising.
My partner is an IBMer. I’ve met quite a few IBMers who work at home 4 or 5 days per week.
I could do my job at home. Very easily. I work for a major brokerage firm and would only need to install a couple of software programs on my computer at home.
My job kinda precludes telecommuting, and I wouldn’t do it even if I could. Teaching is about face-to-face, 1 on 1 interaction, and that can’t be done via computer (Don’t talk to me about on-line classes. I’ve taken many of them, and they fall far short of being a satisfactory substitute for the classroom experience).
I telecommute every Friday. I’d love to be able to telecommute every single day, but it’s just not feasible in my current position. I work in a data center and it sometimes requires that I physically move cables around, reboot devices (NEVER reboot network devices remotely – things can be real bad if you’re not there to handle a failed boot), etc. I’d love to eventually work it out so I cold telecommute 4 days a week and save all the “on-site” work for one day. I’m still selling it!
It would completely depend on the company.
I’ve had jobs where telecommuting wasn’t the usual mode of operation for our team, but it was considered perfectly fine whenever we were at our “home” office. After all, we often spent weeks away… coming back, you needed a day just to remember where the heck you kept your panties. If you had to do remote assistance via an IM program, play with excel reports, answer email and prepare word docs - you could do it just fine from home. We were happy, our bosses were happy.
The company were I currently work? My boss has actually told me it is “unacceptable” to work from home. OK, why do I have a laptop instead of a desktop, then? 90% of the meetings I have would not be needed if people used the IM and/or were literate; a lot of them are to clarify “what does this email mean.” Oh, and when he needed someone to run a report on days when we weren’t working, the boss was thanking me deeply for doing it from home… maybe he didn’t realize I’d bill for it? 
That’s how my contract is signed. I’ve had several jobs where I had to explain very slowly that I did not need a fax number but an email, in order to send in my timesheets… access to a scanner was easier than to a decently-working fax (and the image is a much better facsimile!)
Except for the “mostly one-day trips” bit, I could have written most of this. I’ve had two positions in the last 10 years where I had no official office space outside my home (including my current job). Most of my work is with my company’s customers or our consultants, most of whom are either on the road at customer sites or working from their own homes. With high-speed internet access and VPN access to our company net, plus a company issued BlackBerry phone, it hardly matters whether I’m at home, on site at a customer, or in our home office. But it is hard to build up the collegial relationships with people in other departments that I’ve generally enjoyed when I was in a more traditional office environment.
We moved almost two years ago, and one of our criteria for a new house was a place I could work from home with some physical isolation from the rest of the family. Got that in spades, with a full finished basement with a living room including a full kitchen, bedroom (my office) with a full bathroom, closet/laundry room, etc. The basement has its own HVAC system and thermostat. Even has windows out onto our back yard. My only real complaint about it is that my company uses T-Mobile for its Blackberry accounts, and reception for T-Mobile is lousy in my office (the lot slopes down to a creek with woods in the back, and the office is on the back of the house, so I’m down in a hole with pine trees all around. I have to go at least up to the second story of the house to get reception sometimes. I can go a quarter-mile away to a coffee shop and have maximum signal.
It’s sometimes difficult to resist the temptation to get distracted by other things, but in general what I’m doing is visible enough to both internal and external parties that if I’m slacking off it’ll be obvious. I also don’t sweat it if I have to (or decide to) take an hour here or there to deal with an errand or a meeting at the kids school, or if I have to run upstairs and restore order among the offspring after they get home from school. I spend enough time on the road that whatever time I’m away from work during the day is more than made up for by the hours I put in during the mornings between the time the kids leave for school and our official start time, and in the evenings after they’re in bed, not to mention the time on planes and in hotel rooms on the road. It was harder in my other remote job, when what did was a lot less obvious to others. I could have gotten away with a lot more. In that situation, I found it was really useful to me to get up and get dressed and drive my son to preschool (about a 40 minute round trip). That made a nice demarcation between “home time” and “work time” – I just looked at it as my commute to work – when I got back home it was time to start work, and I was up and dressed and going that way.
My stepson came to live with his dad and me when he was 12. I had worked from our home for years and never had any distractions. The first few times he interrupted me at work, I told him that he could come into my office under two conditions…either the house was burning down or he was coming to tell me he was dead. 
As expected, he rolled his eyes and left the room with a smile on his face but he didn’t come back into the office after that!
My mom was another story. She’d come over to visit occasionally unannounced. She’d open the door and holler “helllllllllllooooooooooooooo~” in that sing-song sort of way. Inevitably, I was on the phone with a customer at the time so I had to try to wrangle my body and my phone cord out the office door and try to shush her before the customer could hear her. I miss her interruptions now, but at the time, it was annoying as hell.
I’ve been telecommuting for more than 5 years, working for companies in the US and Dubai, and clients in several other countries. I am in software development and have a core group of people I work with via IM. All told, we are probably in half a dozen countries but everyone is instantly available so it works well. So on the days I telecommute, my commute is about 5 meters and I can go to work in my pajamas.