Voice and video chat provider Skype is hoping that by making hosting of meetings and web conferences a seamless experience, its product will become more appealing for  business users. Presumably, users will be able to pay for GoToMeeting access with their Skype credit and sign into GoToMeeting using their Skype credentials, or perhaps it will be added to a premium business subscription plan (GoToMeeting currently costs $49 per month). But don’t get too excited about this integration just yet; it’s not expected to actually become available until the fourth quarter of this year.

This may not be the first partnership like this that Skype announces in the coming months. While its userbase is still growing, Skype is coming under increasing competitive pressure from the likes of Google and Apple; gaining a larger foothold in a relatively untapped business market while its competitors continue go after the consumer market may be a smart move.

Photo courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives

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As with other remote access products TeamViewer and LogMeIn, GoToMyPC works through firewalls, and requires little configuration other than installing the GoToMyPC software on the computer you wish to connect with. GoToMyPC for iPad can remotely connect via 3G or Wi-Fi networks. It includes multi-touch and gesture-based controls for zooming and panning It can emulate keyboard and mouse movements, and features auto-correction for spelling and capitalization. Data transfers use 128-bit AES encryption.

In putting together this post, I’ve relied on the developer’s press release, website and video demo. I haven’t actually tried the app myself, because in order to sign up for the trial of the service, one is required to provide credit card information. Annoyingly, this isn’t made clear until one has completed the first part of the sign-up process, and provided Citrix with one’s email address. The sign-up form says users will be notified before the trial expires, and their cards won’t be charged until the 30-day trial period has expired. However, I won’t provide credit card information under such circumstances, and I think many others will feel the same way. Frankly, I think Citrix has made a big mistake here. There are too many competing solutions to put people off with such antiquated requirements. And what about workers who might want to try out the program but don’t have access to company credit cards?

The iPad version of GoToMyPC is available from the iTunes App Store. Pricing for the service starts at $9.95 per month per computer, with annual and multiple-computer plans available.

Have you used GoToMyPC? Would you use an iPad to connect to your work computer?

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As companies ramp up their hiring, they’re encountering more workers who expect these capabilities, Caine said. That has shifted the balance of power in IT to empowered workers, who are demanding more flexible tools and the ability to connect remotely.

That’s helping boost sales of Citrix Online’s tools, such as GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Caine said GoToMeeting, for example, is the only collaboration tool that has been gaining share in the last five years. Companies must learn to offer the kind of simplicity that employees demand, Caine said. “The technology should be invisible, it should go away and allow you to solve problems without getting in the way,” he said.

Recent research conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Citrix shows where companies ought to focus their efforts. Caine said surprisingly 50 percent of boomers use social media compared to 40 percent for Generation Y, something he said may be due to older generations using the tools more for work and having the stature and time to use it more freely. Only 33 percent of American workers use video chat compared to 63 percent of Europeans. And only 14 percent of small and medium businesses use video conferencing as opposed to 40 percent of enterprise companies. Finally, 91 percent of people surveyed said they still prefer e-mail, phone and face-to-face meetings. ”There is enormous amount of opportunity to transition the global workforce,” he said.

Despite the fact that SMBs are far more likely to have employees working remotely than larger organizations, they haven’t invested in collaboration tools to the extent that enterprises have, according to the Citrix Online report: the company behind tools such as GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting. The study, carried out by Forrester Research, looked at the working habits of employees in the U.S., the UK, Germany, France and Australia, and revealed that while 31 percent of SMB employees work remotely at least some of the time (versus 21 percent of enterprise employees), SMBs are using collaboration tools significantly less than enterprises. Some 35 percent of SMBs use audio conferencing tools, compared to 58 percent of enterprises, while just 14 percent of SMBs use video conferencing tools, versus 40 percent of enterprises.

The results of the Citrix survey might sound somewhat surprising given the availability, usefulness and low cost of many web-based collaboration tools, and illustrates this gap in culture. Perhaps some businesses feel they don’t need such tools, or feel they can’t fit them into their workflows. Some organizations might even be unaware of the benefits that collaboration software can offer to remote workers.

The study also looked into differences in attitude toward flexible working from companies in different countries and found that U.S.-based workers tend to have less flexible work arrangements than those in other countries. Twenty-three percent of workers in the U.S. work from home at some point during the week, vs 34 percent in the UK, for example. And just 11 percent of U.S. employees work while traveling (at a coffee shop or airport, for example), compared to 30 percent in France.

The mindset of U.S-based firms toward flexible working will have to change in the future, however, if companies want to attract and retain the best talent. Data released today in anther report — Cisco’s Connected World survey — revealed that most workers (66 percent) would prefer to have the option of flexible working over a higher salary. The Cisco study (which draws on a survey of end users and IT decision makers in a variety of countries) says that two-thirds of workers would like to have the option of flexible working, with 60 percent of workers feeling that they don’t need to be in the office to be productive.

This begs the question: If flexible working arrangements could help businesses to attract talent and could also mean lower overhead in terms of salaries, why don’t more companies offer it currently? One of the primary reasons is also revealed in the Cisco report: 45 percent of IT professionals are struggling to make their workforces more mobile and distributed, with security, insufficient budget and corporate culture cited as the biggest obstacles.

If you’re interested in learning more about the opportunities that broadband, mobility and collaboration tools have created for connecting work and workers, and the challenges that organization face as they move to more distributed working, you should check out our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on Dec. 9.

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• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

HDFaces will support:

• A video conferencing viewer that’s integrated into the content screen so attendees can collaborate on shared content and see each other at the same time.
• One-click web, audio and video conferencing.
• Video optimization that automatically adjusts to suit the hardware and network each participant is using when video, audio or screen sharing are in use.
• A resizable viewer and layouts, which can be adapted to numerous monitor and projection configurations.
• No specific or proprietary hardware configuration: Any HD-capable video conferencing viewer will be able to support HDFaces.

HDFaces is based on technology originally developed by VidSoft GmbH, a Dresden, Germany-based video conferencing provider, which was recently acquired by Citrix Systems.

A beta version of the product is being previewed today, with commercial availability expected in the first quarter of 2011. The technology will be available at no extra cost to users of GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and GoToTraining.

Immersive, high quality HD video conferencing has been available for some time for some time via expensive corporate telepresence systems, like those from Cisco. The fact that it’s starting to become more widely available in cheaper teleconferencing tools like GoToMeeting and Skype is great news for those of us who work remotely.

Photo by Flickr user jenny8lee, licensed under CC 2.0.

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• Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

If you don’t already have a Zoho account, then you can sign up with your Facebook ID.

If you already have a Zoho account, you can connect your Zoho apps to your Facebook account by linking them in your account preferences:

While this is good news for the 400 million-plus Facebook users out there, I’m left wondering at the continued lack of support for other popular sign-in options, such as Twitter and (more importantly) OpenID. I hope that they will be added soon.

Does Facebook Connect support make Zoho a more attractive option for you?

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Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

Free Web Desktops

If you’re not interested in hosting your own virtual desktop or are not quite ready to invest in an expensive corporate class solution like the ones offered up by Microsoft, WMware and Citrix, then you might be interested in some of these free web desktop offerings. These services provide extremely easy do-it-yourself solutions that even the least technically-savvy individuals can set up.

iCloud from Xcerion provides a super-slick web desktop that you can set up in a few minutes. Its free public version provides 3GB of online storage for files and documents, and plenty of free applications such as a Twitter client, instant messenger for many services, email, calendar and much more. You can also add free widgets to your desktop, just like your regular one. It’s a neat product, but one issue that Simon highlighted when he wrote about it earlier this year is a lack of browser support.

EyeOS is another cloud desktop, but it’s a little different because it’s an open-source platform that you can either install and run on your own server, or you can create a free hosted account. One of the big advantages this one has — besides being able to host your own online desktop — is that you can actually create Word documents and spreadsheets with the included web applications. You can save your documents on your virtual desktop or download them to your local computer. Another interesting aspect is the fact that you can even build your own EyeOS web applications thanks to its open-source development platform. There is a helpful wiki for developers too.

G.ho.st stands for Global Hosted Operating System and it also offers a web desktop where you can run applications and store files that you can access anytime from anywhere.

One of the best things about G.ho.st is that it offers live connection to Google Docs and Zoho Office apps which means you can work on your word documents, spreadsheets and presentations all from your web desktop. There are also many other slick web apps and widgets that you can add to customize your desktop. You can save files on your 15 GB G.ho.st drive and even share files or folders with others. I especially like the ability to share files with non-G.ho.st users by making them public.

There’s also a G.ho.st lite version which is actually a mobile device version of the platform. This is exciting because it means you can access your files on your virtual desktop from your smartphone.

Self-Host Your Own Virtual Desktop

The concept of self-hosted virtual desktops isn’t new by any means, but the technology has matured over the years and has now become more affordable for smaller firms. The biggest self-hosting desktop solutions were originally from Citrix and Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services. Thankfully, the incredible expense involved with establishing virtual desktops has steadily declined through the years.thanks to newer services like like VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Citrix has also unleashed its own open-source virtual solution with its Xen Hyperviser product line.

What web desktops have you tried? Please share them in the comments.

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