• You can compromise, trading off reductions in hassles against a reduction in the quality of service. You can, for example, set up your office PC to have yourself notified of schedule changes via email and simply have it forward a copy of your office email to your home address.
  
  This is far from perfect or elegant, and means you'll be phoning the office to schedule meetings but is dead simple, doesn't require active co-operation from the office Windows gurus, and pretty much gives you the information you need to work with.
  
  
• On the other hand, it kinda sucks from a convenience perspective. To get that, and a few other benefits besides, you could spend the $50 or so for the Ximian evolution desktop. This gives you a fully integrated GNOME GUI with the StarOffice productivity suite and a full Microsoft Exchange client - shown in use below.
  
  
  Screenshot
  
  With this stuff on your home box and a decent connection to your office server, you might as well be in the office when it comes to scheduling and email, plus you have such Linux advantages as the more consistent GUIs, full multi-tasking, and greater reliability. The downside, other than the 50 bucks, is that the Windows babysitters in your office can kill this by fire walling you off from the server.
  
  Of course that shouldn't happen, but it often does because a lot of these guys don't really understand where the security problems are and how to get you hooked up without compromising it. The right answer is for them to establish a virtual private network, or VPN, in which your email and scheduling information is encrypted as it travels across the internet. There are two main ways to do this:
  1. 1. for a fixed link environment, for example between your home and your office, the right answer is a router, like the linksys DSLrouter ($66 from your local Gateway store), that has encryption and "tunneling" capabilities built in. That's a basically bullet proof, reasonably low cost, approach that doesn't depend on PC software at the server end - you plug in both ends, turn them on, and the link works.
     
  2. for a roving remote user, for example someone connecting from hotel rooms while traveling, the better approach is to process the user's email and scheduling information under a secure web server. Almost all major browsers have encryption capabilities built in, so a remote user just fires up the browser and creates a fully secure session by logging into the office https server.
     
     This takes some office set-up and requires an an additional processing step on the server but has a fixed cost that changes only with large jumps in the number of users. For one user the $5,000 or so required in the Windows server environment is a lot; for 500, it's about the same as a can of Hub's roast peanuts.
  
  Both, of course are cheaper and more reliable than using something like the CISCO VPN client for Windows 2000 but, sadly, the more common answer is for the wingots to insist on a Windows client and so use your choice of Linux at home as an excuse to wash their hands of the problem.
  
  
• Option three gives you a sneaky way of addressing that attitude by making it a Windows networking problem, but it too requires some degree of co-operation by the office gurus.
  
  For this option you use either the freeware or shareware versions of the VNC product from AT&T's British research lab. This comes as two parts: a server which you run on the remote host (your office pc) and a viewer you run on your home machine. VNC connects the mouse and keyboard on the remote host to their equivalents on the local, or viewer, machine while mapping the remote monitor to a local window. As a result it gives you your complete office desktop in a Linux window at home.
  
  Setting up either version for default configurations is utterly trivial - basically click "install" and go. Getting it to work with secure shell and/or with a PC type firewall that does network address translation requires some expertise but also illustrates the fundamental open source idea that there's always another choice. In this case the people behind tightvnc offer an upgraded shareware version (they ask for $10.00) that makes this kind of thing much easier.

VNC connects a client, or viewer, with a server but doesn't really restrict what those are, so people have done versions for devices including the Geo communicator and Palm Pilot - just in case you want to run your Windows 2000 based Excel spreadsheet from your playphone.

In fact, if both ends support true multi-tasking you can run both the server and the client simultaneously on each of two machines to produce an apparently endless recursion of screen images containing screen images - like holding a mirror before a mirror.

Screenshot