James E. Gaskin

The corporate desktop has looked the same for decades: computer, keyboard, mouse, desk phone, maybe a printer. But do these tools dominate because they're the perfect combination of technology needed for work today, or is the enterprise workplace due for an extreme makeover?

Death of the mouse

It's hard to miss a Check Point appliance, because they all have bright orange boxes and bright yellow front panels. The Safe@Office 1000N is no exception, and the small metal box with the gaudy paint job stands out. Check Point has a large number of security products, but the Safe@Office 1000N and the wireless enabled 1000NW are the only small business specific products.

All the connections are on the back of the box, with status lights on the front. There are four 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet ports, one dedicated WAN port, a combo WAN2/DMZ port and a console RJ45 serial port. Accessories include a serial-to-RJ45 cable for command line fans, an Ethernet patch cable, a documentation CD, an illustrated Getting Started Guide, and a sales pitch for optional advanced services features.

The SonicWall TZ 200 is the middle product between the TZ 100 and the TZ 210, and the smallest and lightest appliance in this test. White and bright and about the size of a CD wallet, it looks more like an Apple product than a firewall.

Prices for SonicWall products are hard to pin down because, while the firewall and router have no client license fees, adding support for security features such as enhanced client anti-virus and anti-spyware, VPN Client Windows, UTM SSL VPNs, and a few other options need user licenses. Figure around the $400 to $450 range to start, depending on whether you add wireless support, and tally up your options from there.

A metal box with all the plugs in the back and status lights on the front, the TRENDnet Dual WAN Advanced VPN Router covers the same price range as Netgear. Four 10/100 Fast Ethernet ports, along with separate WAN1 and WAN2 ports fill the back of the unit. The nine-pin serial port for a console connection looks positively nostalgic in today's world of RJ45 and USB ports.

The BRV324 advertises support for 70 IPSec and 10 PPTP VPN connections, or 100 pass-through sessions with IPSec, PPTP and L2TP. There's no firewall throughput number published, but the speeds for the BRV324 across two broadband connections are in the same range as all the other units. A color illustrated Quick Installation Guide is included, along with a CD manual and an Ethernet patch cable.

The smallest unit of the D-Link NetDefend family, the DFL-210 is a dark gray metal box about 6 x 8 in., second largest of the group tested but still relatively small. All the connections are in the back with lights for power and status, Ethernet, WAN and DMZ ports on the front. Air vents on both ends and the top mean you need to place the unit in the open for air flow.

Included are two Ethernet patch cables, the power supply and a documentation CD. Unfortunately, the Quick Installation Guide is only on CD, with no paper version. Worse, the guide has errors. Also included are a Firewall Registration Manual (that's on paper) and a serial console cable for a command line interface.

1. Portability with Extended Battery Life

So many people commented and sent e-mail about last week's column on WiFi I had to check and make sure I didn't accidentally insult Apple or claim Linux was better than Windows. Nope, I just said WiFi wasn't always the best way to network. Nobody disagreed with my assertions that WiFi runs slower and is less secure than wired networks, but many readers suggested the WiFi train is the way to the future, so I should hop on. All aboard?

While I used to say WiFi cost more than wired networks, the lowered cost of WiFi and the higher cost of labor to run new network cables has reversed the cost equation for many connections. Laptops almost always have WiFi support today, and adding WiFi to a desktop costs a minimal amount. Running new wires cost more than adding WiFi to a desktop and the cost of a wireless access point. Everyone except the Cable Runners Union agrees WiFi wins almost all cost comparisons when you include wiring labor for new installations.

We have days for lovers (Valentine's Day) and for heroes (Memorial Day), so why not a day for e-mail (Information Overload Awareness Day)? The Information Overload presentation was about far more than just e-mail, but e-mail leads the deluge of information for most workers. So let's deal with the deluge, use addressing fields correctly, and look at e-mail writing from the bottom up.

Artwork: Chip TaylorAccording to the excellent book Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, workers in Fortune 1000 companies spend four hours per day, every day, working with e-mail. That sounds both like information overload and like a normal day for far too many people. If you say you get 200 e-mail messages per day, looking for sympathy, the one-uppers around will start telling you about inboxes with 300 or 400 or more messages. Has the e-mail deluge become a badge of honor? Or is admitting you can't handle your e-mail workload somehow newsworthy?

According to Parade magazine, paper consumption in the US peaked in 1999. But although paper use may be trending down, most companies still deal with pounds upon pounds of paper every day. Let's look at three ways to better create, send, receive and retrieve paper and the information thereon.

Reducing paper use saves money and gives you green credit that's earned, not faked. Am I the only one who finds the “We're going green!” brochures contradictory?

What goes up must come down, and lately what's coming down are netbooks, as more and more articles talk about the compact computers disappointing customers. However, we can't blame netbooks for that. We can only blame vendors who overhype and customers who underbuy. Before you buy a smaller, cheaper and less powerful netbook, determine if you need a notebook instead. If so, you can spend about the same money and get more power, albeit in a larger package.

Let's decide what a “netbook” really is. Most definitions focus on the processor, an Intel Atom rather than some flavor of Celeron, Mobile Pentium, Dual Core or one of AMD's models. Screen sizes are small, either 8.9 or 10 diagonal inches, rather than 13 inches like the smallest notebooks and MacBooks. We'll leave Apple out of this discussion since it makes excellent small notebooks but refuses to jump into the netbook market.

VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) is a terrible acronym but a great technology. But the industry thinks many people still believe many "myths" about running telephone traffic over the Internet. If Internet telephones don't work in your situation, that's one thing, but don't let old information keep you from leveraging new services and cost savings.

One vendor, Speakeasy, sells Internet telephone services called "hosted VoIP" where the only equipment on your premise are the Internet telephones and the Internet connection. The company has anointed itself the "VoIP Myth Buster" and called me up to explain why.