1. What are the challenges facing a business looking to increase support for home-working?

Any business looking to encourage home working must firstly source the right ISP to ensure a reasonable speed in working between the home office and the in-house server/host provider.

Reliability of the ISP must also be considered.

It is fundamental that users working from home are able to fully access the appropriate functionality of the system, in order to perform their job function effectively. The challenge is for the system administrator to define user classes and user rights, and set these up in accordance with the individual users’ business roles.

Should a system be unable to define differing user classes and entry screen specifications, the home-worker will suffer, as they will be faced with too much information being downloaded, which will affect the individual’s performance, and, in turn, also affect the overall performance of the solution. It is therefore imperative that a system that will be utilised by any employees working from home is flexible enough to allow these differing levels of users classes and user rights to be created. MRI’s software is flexible enough to allow this, and as such we have clients using our property management software in this way.

2. There are several different technological platforms for mobile computing. Please rate the following on a scale of 1-5 (1 irrelevant, never likely to be significant, 5 a major platform.)

- i-mode? - 4
- WiFi? - 4
- WAP? - 2

3. What approaches do you support for out of office working?

- Web based access? Yes, via Citrix and HTML
- Dial up networking? Yes, via Citrix
- PDA - Yes
- WAP - No
- WiFi - No

4. Can your application be used offline as well as online?

This could be achieved, although to date, no MRI clients are using the system in this way.

5. How do you see the market developing in the future in terms of mobile computing and remote working?

Whilst mobile computing has been available for some time, the advent of hand-held computers has meant that more and more members of the property industry have now embraced this technology. It is imperative to surveyors and property managers that they have access to up-to-date information whilst on site, at the touch of a button. With the advances in mobile technology, transactions can now be processed from any location in the world.

We are also finding that third parties associated with property companies are increasingly requiring access to aspects of the property management systems and the associated data, obviously with the appropriate security measures in place. The internet is perfect for this style of use, and, for low levels of data transition works very effectively in today’s marketplace. In order to fulfill this need, property systems must be flexible and sophisticated enough to provide full access to the required parts of the system and related data whilst at the same time, ensuring that secure data and irrelevant information is not accessible to third parties.

Property organisations are increasingly enquiring with MRI about the best potential options to enable remote/home working within their business. In order to facilitate effective remote working, solutions must not only be functionally rich but also be portable and accessible to all grades of staff and third parties, such as suppliers, clients, investors, tenants etc. MRI’s solutions can offer both this level of functionality and portability, and as such, a number of our clients now have employees and related third parties accessing our software remotely.