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Flickr Photo Credit: Night Star Romanus

Several of you have asked about the specifics of corporate email on the road, and how we are deciding which format we will use.

Here are some basic bullet points, including some new decisions / information we have come across in the last day or so.

• Obviously, there are the popular free services such as yahoo or hotmail. Many people run all of their small business email through these services by having the name of the business be the first part of the email address. While David and I each have one of these types of addresses as our international and on the road contact point, I have never felt that using them as a business address was the way to go, preferring an email address directly tied to our domain name(s).
• Once your domain name emails have been established, the question becomes accessing them from the road in a secure manner. In a previous post, I had mentioned a service I had heard about called mail2web. This enables you to check business email from the road, but have the information stay on the corporate server. I have to admit, this was looking to me to be very much the way I wanted to go. After talking to one of my tech guru colleauges (and the person who is updated other areas of my educational web site), he was more comfortable with me using a secure service on my current site using software he already knew and could provide support for more easily if I had problems.  So as far as checking it on the road from a web based system, that is how we will probably be going.
• On to the third option, and that is checking your email from your pc as usual, via an option like gotomypc.com or pcanywhere software. This enables you to access your main computer remotely, and use your regular internet browser to check multiple email accounts as usual.

Where are we? Well, at this point it looks like we’ll be going with a hybrid. Of course, many of our expat and other long term friends have our yahoo addresses, so we’ll continue to use those for basic communications. As for the web based corporate email access, we’ll be taking Michael’s advice and using the secure software he set up for us on the server. Although, I have to say for those of you with small businesses who need to pinch pennies in this arena, the mail2web option certainly appears to provide a lot of features for free.  For access to our files and other software, we’ll probably also incorporate one of the remote personal pc access programs as well. However, we did hear back from our server company. They don’t have an actual data center at their office, as they actually service the product from a larger data center where the servers are kept.  So we still need to find a place to leave our laptop where it can be hooked in to internet while we are on the road. The cottage at the lake isn’t set up to do this. This is yet another hurtle, but it does appear we are narrowing in on a plan.

Note: I realize that there are many business formats out there which would allow for a much simpler decision about this. Unfortunately, ours isn’t one of them. With the amount of time we’ll be on the road, and the number of things that will still need to be coordinated while we are, we want to know things will work the way we need them to on the road less traveled.

Posted on October 28th, 2006 by Myscha Theriault
Filed under: Working from the Road