Get Your Work to Go

There are some places where a laptop computer just doesn't belong. For Tom Bestor, creative director at Group X LLC, a media-production company in San Rafael, California, one such place was among the bowls and dishes of a lunch meeting that he planned to have with Japanese executives. When he went to the restaurant in Tokyo to hammer out the content of a presentation to be given by the chairman of Sony, he intentionally left his laptop behind. At one point, though, his client wanted to see the details of the production schedule, located in Bestor's email archives. No problem: After lunch, Bestor simply borrowed the nearest computer and used Yahoo! Mail on the Web to rifle through his email.

"I'd love to be able to dump my laptop altogether," says Bestor, 42, who still lugs his seven-pound PowerBook to most meetings. "Why should I have to carry everything around when there are computers everywhere I go? Maybe someday I won't have to."

That day may not be too far off. A slew of technology companies are aiming to put all of your work tools -- from email and appointment books to word-processing programs and important documents -- on the Web, providing access from any computer. Their reasoning: With computers becoming nearly as commonplace as telephones, and with most of them providing Internet connections, you should be able to access your software and data files anywhere -- rather than having to schlepp them around in a heavy plastic box.

Technically speaking, your programs and files aren't going anywhere; they're sitting on a Web server. But the beauty of the Internet lies in its power to make geography irrelevant. Whether you're in Toledo or Taiwan, you're only a few clicks away from your work. Your office, like the Web, is everywhere.

That's the theory, anyway. In reality, many of these computer-free computing vehicles are still in the training-wheels phase. But the companies behind them are pedaling hard, and there are now enough Web tools to begin leveraging this ubiquitous network. So, on your next trip, you really will be able to leave your laptop behind.

Come-As-You-Are Computing

All eyes are on you as you stroll into the conference room to make your presentation. Miami is a long way from your company's headquarters in Minneapolis, but you've brought nothing more than a linen suit and a confident smile -- no laptop, no video gear, no cables. You take a seat behind the standard-issue computer and projector in the center of the room. A few clicks later, you've got your customized presentation software up and running. Within moments, a sleek video springs to life on the projection screen; it shows how a little cold-pack ingenuity can heat up food exports to South America. The room buzzes. How did you do that? "No sweat," you casually reply. "Your office is my office."

There are about four or five business applications (word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation graphics, and the like) that form the digital foundation of most offices. That may be why the virtual office has had a somewhat shaky start: The foundation has been missing. Although some of the organizational niceties, such as calendars and contact managers, are readily available on the Web, the heavyweight "office" applications are MIA. But that's about to change.

Sun Microsystems says that by this spring, you'll be able to run its StarOffice applications (which are comparable to the programs in Microsoft Office, such as Word, Access, Excel, and PowerPoint), directly from the Web. Corel says that its office suite, WordPerfect Office, is undergoing a similar makeover for the Web. Not to be outdone, Microsoft has announced that by midyear it too will "rent" its Office software over the Web, albeit only to users of Windows-based PCs.

Meanwhile, several startups are getting a jump on their Goliath-size competitors. Desktop.com and myWebOS.com are each online with new -- and, so far, free -- sites promising to bring a full (and fully accessible) working environment to the Web.

Desktop.com and myWebOS.com work in a similar fashion. After logging onto the site using your name and password, you're presented with a screen that has the familiar windows-and-icons setup of a Windows or a Macintosh operating system. As with a PC or a Mac that has software stored on its hard drive, you can launch programs, load files, create or edit documents, and save your work. The critical difference: All of this occurs within a Web browser, and your files and programs reside on a distant server, not on a local hard drive.

Although Desktop.com offers the snazzier interface, myWebOS.com is further along in providing the features of an online office. At press time, the company's HyperOffice was expected to include such staples as word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentation graphics, group calendars, and email. (The early beta version included only HyperWord, email, and a few extras.) In addition, myWebOS.com provides several third-party programs, including employee-management and travel-expense software.