What's your best solution for staying connected while on the road?

Meeting professionals tend to be road warriors. We are often running or attending meetings away from our office.

Consequently, we are challenged to hone our business travel skills – especially in terms of staying connected with our clients, staff, family and significant others while on the road. This article will touch on several ways to improve this connectivity.

The nature of things today is our clients and staff expect a quick response to questions even when we are traveling.– a nanosecond would be just fine thank you very much.

A key step toward good connectivity while traveling is to get a good smart phone allowing you to read and respond to email, to manage text massages, to view web sites, and, oh yes – you can even make phone calls with these things. There are many flavors out there, Blackberries, Treos, Iphones, Moto Q, and more. The ability to integrate with Outlook contacts, calendar, tasks and email can be very helpful.

Many mobile phones these days have broadband, the ability to connect to the internet with faster than dialup speeds. My Treo 750 is EV-DO capable. EV-DO nonsensically stands for Evolution Data Optimized (in Europe and the rest of the world is 3G or Edge) – but what it means is that you can access the internet at speeds several times faster than phone dialup. I can plug my phone to my computer and it acts as a digital modem. It's not blazingly fast but certainly fast enough to check email.

Alternatively, If you are lugging around your notebook computer, you can use an EVDO card that plugs into the side slot in your computer, bypassing the phone entirely and log onto the internet everywhere there is cell phone signal capable of handling this – which is nearly every urban area in north America. Pricing for data plans start at about US$29/month. Similar networks are available internationally with data speeds expected to continually increase over time.

Another means of internet connectivity is Wi-Fi – short for Wireless Fidelity. Nearly every notebook computer built since 2003 is Wi-Fi enabled, meaning that it can receive high-speed internet access via radio waves. Several airports and most mid-price hotels and even some cities are offering Wi-Fi access for free.

Others will charge you by the hour or month, but it is a great way of accessing the internet usually with good connection speeds. It is also very much a global standard. Recent trips I have taken in Vietnam and the Baltic States were like traveling in a giant Wi-Fi hot spot – nearly everywhere I opened up my computer I could access the internet at good connection speeds for free. This will become increasingly so everywhere.

Next year we will likely receive another option called WiMax – it is similar to Wi-Fi but with much broader coverage (miles instead of meters) – so mobile phone and notebook connectivity to the internet will continue to improve as the years go by.

Also helpful on the road is the ability to access your office desktop computer using a standard web browser. When you log in, the web browser will all alloy you to see exactly the screen on your desktop computer at work.  There are lots of reasons why you might want to do this -- to email yourself a file on your hard drive; to be able to view documents that your smart phone can't open, or even to check out your office web cam to see if you cat or dog is doing fine.

There are a few software services that will allow you to do this for you. The first and most common program around is GoToMyPc ( www.gotomypc.com )– a remote desktop viewing service costing under $20/month.

However, another service, LogMeIn.com ( www.logmein.com ), does this for free! I have been using Logmein to remotely access my office desktop computer for nearly two years and it works great.

Speaking of free web software tools, one that I use regularly (especially when I call or travel overseas) is Skype (www.skype.com ).  This is a VoIP (Voice over the Internet) software program that can be downloaded to your computer turning you computer into a phone. As long as you have broad band connectivity, you can talk to another person who has downloaded the program on their computer on an unlimited basis for free.

However, the feature that I use most frequently is Skype Out. With this, you can use your computer to dial any number in the world at a fraction of international calling rates – typically at 2 cents/minute. You have to prepay with a credit card to use SkypeOut. I prepaid US$10 and have made at least 100 short international calls using Skype and I still haven't used up this credit yet. Traveling overseas with my notebook computer, I simply get a Wi-Fi broadband connection, review through my email to listen to the attached voice messages, and use SkypeOut to call people back when the time zone is correct.

One tip about using Skype, bring along your headphones rather than using the speakers in your notebook computer. This will eliminate an echo the person you are calling would normally hear if speakers are used.

One final tip that I have found helpful when on the road. I normally do not forward my calls to my mobile phone while traveling as typically, I am in the air, in meetings or speaking to a group and can't answer them anyway. Instead, I use a VoIP phone service for my office – a service offered by many cable and some phone companies. One of common VoIP options available is that you can have your phone messages delivered via email as an attached audio file. You then can simply check your email, listen to the attached voice files, and respond accordingly. When I am overseas, I will Skype the callers back at a time when they are awake.

So these are some of the tools to stay connected while on the road. I will leave you with one caution, however. As important as staying connected while on the road is, I submit that the most important part of using technology wisely, is to learn when to turn off the switch. We all need down time and we need a break from the ongoing demands we receive. We will need to individually decide what this limit is – when you want to be connected, using the above tools now you can.

Corbin Ball, CMP, CSP is a professional speaker and consultant focusing on meetings technology. With 20 years of experience running international citywide technology meetings, he now helps clients worldwide use technology to save time and improve productivity He can be contacted at his extensive web site: www.corbinball.com

©2008 Corbin Ball Associates