In this age of the mobile worker, the number one wish on the IT department's list is the ability to connect to a remote network user's devices to install updates, repair software or gather diagnostic information, according to those participating in a survey.

With the continued increase in the proportion of a company's staff who need mobile or remote connectivity to the workplace, IT is having to deal with a new set of support issues. Forrester Consulting forecasts that enterprise mobile workers will make up 73 percent of the workforce by 2012 in North America and Europe.

As the mobile and remote (those working from somewhere else, such as home) workers increase, IT is dealing with the complexity of catering to different and sometimes incompatible mobile platforms. About half of North American and European enterprises are currently supporting more than one mobile operating system, according to Forrester's survey.

About 36 percent of all computers in enterprises are laptops, thin clients/dumb terminals, tablet computers or netbooks. Companies are also having to decide how or if to support mobile computing platforms, mobile phones and smartphones. Currently, 46 percent provide some support for personal mobile phones or smartphones.

"Clearly mobile and remote users represent a different, if not more onerous, set of support challenges," the company says in a report of the survey.

When asked how to mitigate the burden of supporting mobile and remote workers, 91 percent of enterprises with manual mobile support processes currently in place said that the ability to connect to remote devices would be a key IT investment.

Other key tools on the wish list include secure, bi-directional access to mobile/remote users (65 percent) and increasing the IT resources dedicated to supporting mobile and remote workers (48 percent).

Those enterprises surveyed believe that the ability to proactively support mobile and remote workers will increase satisfaction with IT (78 percent) and increase the productivity of the remote workers (72 percent) and efficiency of IT (67 percent).

"Mobility is here to stay, and investment in tools to better support mobile and remote users represents a significant upside for the business as a whole," Forrester concludes.

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We are getting to the end of the year and everyone is publishing their top lists. The search engines have all published their top lists of popular search terms. Since those are well covered by the media I am going to focus on the Technorati Top 100 list, which, by the way, is updated daily as websites swim into view or sink into the depths of the Internet, never to be seen again.

The Technorati list ranks blogs, and the number one site is The Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com), which burst on the scene in 2005 and has now become the counter to the extreme so-called conservative commentary proliferating on the Internet.

The HuffPost has 22 million unique users each month and is the most linked-to blog on the internet. That is a lot of eyeballs, perhaps attracted by the celebrity commentators. Number two on the Technorati Top 100 is TechCrunch (www.techcrunch.com), proving that geekdom still rules the net.

Number three is Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net), and I don't know why. What exactly is Boing Boing's focus? The menu lists technology, gadgets, science, business, entertainment among other topics. To me, what is of interest is the lack of focus. Blogs, according to current wisdom, cater to specific audiences, who come to be part of a "community". The general fuzziness of purpose is due to Boing Boing's transformation from an online magazine format in 1988 to a website in 1995 and to a blog in 2000. Now it is referred to as a "media empire".

As an aside, excuse all the words with quotes around them. I put them there, to highlight that these are evolutionary terms that have come to have alternative meanings in the Internet age.

Better known is the fourth place holder, Gizmodo (www.gizmodo.com), which tops its competitor Engadget. The site is a quick hit list of commentary on gadgets. These mini reviews are spiced with a nice seasoning of humour and mockery, giving it a bit more spice than the average press release. I use the site often, if only to check out what I cannot afford.

Mashable! (http://mashable.com), in the fifth spot, bills itself as a social media guide. Gawker (www.gawker.com), Engadget (www.engadget.com), The Corner on National Review (http://corner.nationalreview.com), The Daily Beast (www.thedailybeast.com) and Think Progress (http://thinkprogress.org) fill out the rest of the top 10.

To see what else is on the blog radar go to http://technorati.com/blogs/top100.

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I received a bizarre "Out of office" email this week. The ambiguous message serves as an example of how to either signal to your clients the possibility of problems in your office; it says too way too much and leaves a lot of reading in between the lines. The names have been changed to protect the guilty: Subject: Out of Office: Press query - "Unfortunately A. B. is unwell and no longer a part of the C.D. corporate team. Please resend all correspondence to E.F., Conference Assistant. Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience. "

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